Coaching has become acceptable to both business and individuals to help improve performance, manage stress and achieve work and personal goals. There is a rich amount of paperwork in this direction but what exactly coaching means and how it works?

Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to help to maximize their own performance. It is helping people to learn rather than teaching them, being directly concerned with immediate improvement of performance and development of skills by a form of tutoring or instruction.

Coaching has known different approaches over time, but the evidence-based one remains cognitive behavioral coaching (CBC), as derived from cognitive behavioral therapy. CBC stands as “an integrative approach that combines cognitive techniques and strategies, the behavioral problem solving and a cognitive-behavioral framework, allowing cell directed achieve realistic goals.” Since 1990, CBC has begun to incorporate the concepts, strategies, techniques and approaches from the sphere of rational emotive behavior, from the one focused on problems and solutions, from the the theory of social setting goals or from the social-cognitive theory.

As the main objective, the CBC aims, besides setting realistic goals, helping the coachee become aware of cognitive and emotional barriers that stand in the way of achieving his goals, to direct him to develop skills and effective thinking patterns, to guide the construction of own resources of self acceptance to allow him to take control of their actions and, not least, by making him his own coach.

Although it is as active-directive approach in the sense that block goals thoughts, feelings and behaviors and relationship between elements are identified, and modified, CBC purpose is not to give people solutions to difficulties they encounter but rather to assist them, through a collaborative process, as they formulate their own solutions and conclusions.

Guided discovery is based on Socratic dialogue, during which the coach addressed some questions around a central theme and determines the individual to become aware of how he structures his thinking on certain issues. Interrogation of this kind aims at changing a rigid way of thinking in one flexible, in order to find adaptive strategies to solve problems.

As the individual possesses a more accurate view of his own limits and strengths, he has a good chance to change cognitions and behaviors in order to improve their lives.