What They Are and What They Are Not?

Development is more than just changing your everyday routine. It’s a holistic experience that involves a lot more than just changing the way you speak or act. In order to make the process of development easier, a professional developmental coach is needed to ensure safe adult development and growth.

But what exactly do developmental coaches do and don’t do?

Developmental coaches are

 

Challengers

A development coach is the person that challenges you to get out of your comfort zone, i.e., whatever it is in how easily you can think about paradox and abiguity; and whatever it is in your concept of who you are and who you need to do what for; that keeps you from achieving what you need to achieve.  A coach ensures that you confront whatever it is that keeps you from growing as a person or as a professional.

A developmental coach  challenges you to  find out what becoming a better person, an even more "grown-up adult" means to you and how you can achieve it. A coach helps the person they train to understand the potentials they have that they can use to evolve and transform for the better.

 

Guides

Coaches guide people to find their own path, accompany them on that path  towards transformation and development.  They don't doesn’t force you to follow the path, but ultimately lessens the pain and wasted effort of walking in random circles through the grass.

 

Honest Friends

Your coach won’t force you to be the best that you can be in a manner that you wouldn’t like, but rather accompany you in experimenting with everything you might become. Until you find the right direction for you to grow in as an adult.

Your coach will make you understand what your actions entail and will hold you accountable with its effect on your life and who you are becoming.

 

Developmental coaches are not

 

Baby sitters or Role Models

Your coach will facilitate and guide you in every part of your journey towards growth. However, your coach will not spoon feed you the ideals and realizations that you need to develop. Nor will they expect you to become like them. Your motivations, ideas, expression, and beliefs -- in essence, who you are -- are inherent to being uniquely you.

 

Set the goals for you

Goal setting is one important step in every venture. When it comes to personal growth, goal setting is also a vital step that you need to personally take.Goal setting also requires you to look at the bigger picture and evaluate what parts you need and don’t need to change in your life.

What a developmental coach will do is help you understand how goal clashes lead you to do things you blame yourself for doing. For example, clashes between a goal to prevent harm and one to achieve something you aspire to. (Usually we are not aware that the goal to prevent harm is even there, driving our behaviour. So we blame ourselves for being weak, instead of realising we are really strong in achieving a hidden goal.)

 

The Great Judge

Your coach is your friend. In order for them to help you grow, you need to trust that they can help you without judging you or looking at you in a wrong way. They’re not that superior judge, though, that you need to please or explain everything to.

Your coach is one person you can trust as far as your woes are concerned. Understanding what your developmental coach is and isn’t will help you understand how they can help you to become the best version of you, professionally and personally.

 

When should you choose a developmental coach or a performance coach?

If you are challenged in life and work, and you

- realise you need to think in ways you have never been able to think before, to find options you currently have difficulty even imagining

- realise that who you believe you are, and need to be, is a barrier to achieving your goals

- realise that something in you is resisting a new role because of how strongly you identify yourself with the present role

- you want to be better able to manage or lead others to achieve their potential, be fully engaged and productive at work.