What exactly is the purpose of coaching? What does coaching aim for?
“The brain feels comfortable about what is the same, but learns from what is different.” -Kathleen La Valle
So if you want to learn something new, you need to tune your brain to do something different. As long as you do the same things in the same way as ever before, you will achieve the same results as always before.
Learning, then, means that we do something differently than before.
So, our brains like similarity and therefore our brains are constantly looking for evidence e.g. to our own views and our own beliefs.
Hence, if you want to learn something new or want to achieve different results in some way, you have to somehow get out of that habitual world of yours – your habit of seeing things, your habit of experiencing things – and in some way give your brain a new kind of stimulus.
Through these new experiences, you then get, in a way, new kinds of patterns for your brain.
So, that is the way you can learn.
As my teacher, Dr. Richard Bandler, once said, “People get smart by trying new things.”
As long as we stick to the same way of thinking and keep on doing the same things, our intelligence will not grow or improve. Therefore, when you try something new, you can grow.
And this is what coaching is about.
The coach’s job is to help their clients experience new kinds of things in some way, or to experience the same things in a new way so that the client’s brain experiences something different. Only through that new experience can you learn something new. And in this way, you can achieve those different results.
Let’s take fears or anxieties, for example: even in them, it is just a matter of seeing and experiencing something over and over again in the same way and then just running it over and over, again and again.
So in order for you to get rid of something like fear, anxiety or anything like that, you have to experience the same thing in some new way. Whether it’s a matter of flying or performing in front of a live audience, for example, when you give it a new meaning, your brain will learn that something is different. That’s when you learn a new way of thinking, a new way of behaving and acting and that’s how you get new results.
That’s what coaching is about. That is the purpose of coaching.
And the fact that you’re getting smarter in some way.
