Christian Coaching, Second Edition

Helping Others Turn Potential into Reality

Gary Collins

Do you long to make a difference in the lives of others?
Every day, companies, churches, families, and individuals turn to coaches for help in navigating life's transitions. A widely used and respected resource for leaders, pastors, and counselors, Christian Coaching will equip you with the tools to help people overcome obstacles and turn their potential into reality. Now updated and expanded, this groundbreaking guide presents a unique biblically based coaching model, designed to help you:

• Develop and refine your active listening skills
• Connect with people on a meaningful level
• Clarify a vision and defining steps to put it into practice
• Guide someone through obstacles and life transitions
• Coach people in a variety of career, marriage, family, and church situations
• Empower people to establish healthy boundaries with friends, family, and work
• And much more

Now with interactive forms and questionnaires for you and your clients, this comprehensive guide may be the most helpful and entertaining book on coaching you'll read. "Dr. Gary Collins takes all the vital elements of coaching and brings them together into one valuable resource. This book is essential for anyone—not just Christians—who wants to make a difference in the lives of others." —Ken Blanchard, coauthor of The One Minute Manager and Lead Like Jesus

PART 1

THE FOUNDATIONS OF CHRISTIAN COACHING

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS COACHING?

Playa Tambor is a remote resort, a short flight north of San Jose on the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. Only my wife knew why I wanted to go there for my birthday. It was a comfortable vacation spot, but, more important, it was isolated and hundreds of miles away from telephone calls, birthday cards, or friends who might be inclined to throw a party. I was about to turn sixty and didn’t want to face this new milestone in my life.

First morning there, I went off to the beach lugging a 670-page book by Betty Friedan, who had written about her own encounters with the later years. I connected with the first words immediately:

When my friends threw a surprise party on my sixtieth birthday, I could have killed them all. Their toasts seemed hostile, insisting as they did that I publicly acknowledge reaching sixty, pushing me out of life, as it seemed, out of the race. Professionally, politically, personally, sexually. Distancing me from their fifty-, forty-, thirty-year-old selves. Even my own kids, though they loved me, seemed determined to be parts of the torture. I was almost taunting in my response, assuring my friends that they, too, would soon be sixty if they lived long enough. But I was depressed for weeks after that birthday party, felt removed from them all. I could not face being sixty.¹

I never finished the book, but I mentioned it to a friend when we got home. George Callendine was a former student who had become a consultant to business and church leaders. I accepted eagerly when he offered to take me through the process that he used to help his clients move through transitions and get their lives and careers back on track. This was the birthday present I needed most.

Over a period of months, we looked at my spiritual gifts, abilities, and interests. We sent questionnaires to the people who knew me best and got their perspectives. With my friend’s gentle guidance, I looked honestly at my goals, career, place in life, values, passions, style of work, and hopes for the future. I’m sure we discussed my concerns about aging and the irrational fears that my younger friends — the ones who keep me creative and challenged — might turn away from me in my old age. For weeks, I struggled to write a mission statement that could clarify my life purpose and be a filter to guide my decisions and activities in the coming years. In all of this, my friend never made demands, gave advice, or told me what to do. Gently he pushed my thinking in new directions, helped me narrow my goals for the future, and kept my focus on what God might want for the remainder of my life. Sometimes he prodded me to consider issues I wanted to avoid. When I set goals, he kept me accountable for reaching them. If I told him about some vague dream for the future, he asked questions to help me clarify what I meant. Throughout it all, George never stopped giving encouragement. My friend was not counseling me. He was not doing consulting. I can see now that I was being coached.

THE MEANING OF COACHING

In the 1500s, the word coach described a horse-drawn vehicle that would get people from where they were to where they wanted to be. Many years later, big buses with rows of seats also were called coaches, and their purpose was the same: to get the people to where they wanted to go. Some writers have suggested that the goal was similar in the ancient athletic world, where coaches helped gifted athletes and teams boost their performance and get to the goal of winning in the Olympic Games.² Others suggest that it was not until the 1880s that the word coach was given an athletic meaning, when it was used to identify the person who tutored university students in their rowing on the Cam River in Cambridge. Whatever its origins, the word stuck and coaches became known as people who help athletes move from one place to another. Over time, the word also became associated with musicians, public speakers, and actors who rely on coaches to improve their skills, overcome obstacles, remain focused, and get to where they want to be. Former Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula writes about the athletes who would come to his team with their skills and talents, ready to submit to the coach whose job was to instruct, discipline, and inspire them to do things better than they thought they could do on their own.³ The coach leaves each person being coached with increased self-confidence, clearer direction, and greater fulfillment than he or she would have had otherwise.

Coaching might have stayed in the realm of sports and entertainment had it not moved into the corporate world a few decades ago. Faced with the unsettling impact of galloping change, rapid technological advances, and tidal waves of information glut, business leaders began to see that no one person could keep abreast of everything. Micromanaging went out of style. The CEO could no longer manage from the top, keep aware of everything that was going on, and have the ability to tell everyone what to do. Experienced business executives with leadership gifts and management skills were faced with people issues such as communication and relationship breakdowns, high levels of turnover and absenteeism, and low levels of productivity, motivation, and commitment. In companies large and small, people at all levels had to learn how to deal with change, develop new management styles, make wise decisions, and become more effective, all while they coped with their hyperactive lifestyles and increasing stress. Some wanted help with their own life planning and life management issues. There was a need to train workers to think and behave like leaders and decision makers. CEOs and other executives wanted people to guide them into this new world, like my young friend coached me through the transition into my sixties. The coaching principles that athletes and performers had used for years emerged in the business community. Personal coaching moved beyond health clubs to corporate offices and the workplace. According to Fortune magazine, coaching became the “hottest thing in management.”⁴

A coach is someone trained and devoted to guiding others into increased competence, commitment, and confidence.

— FREDERIC HUDSON, author of Handbook of Coaching

Although the modern coaching movement got its start and had its earliest growth in the management world, today it is hot everywhere except in the church. People are turning to nutritional coaches, fitness coaches, financial coaches, public-speaking coaches, and what have become known as life coaches who help others find focus and direction for their lives and careers. Some people look for marriage coaches, parenting coaches, coaches for their spiritual journeys, time-management coaches, and coaches to help them through life transitions. All of these coaches come alongside to guide people through life’s challenges and help them move forward with confidence in the midst of change.

Since the 1990s, the field of coaching has grown significantly. The International Coach Federation (ICF) was founded by a few people in 1992, but with its expansion to thousands of members in approximately ninety countries, ICF is now “the largest worldwide resource for business and personal coaches.”⁵ Today there are numerous coaching organizations, including the popular Coachville, the Association for Coaching based in Great Britain, the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC), and Christian organizations, including the Christian Coaches Network. Only a handful of training programs existed in the late 1990s, but one report estimates that more than 300 exist today.⁶ Over sixty groups have begun programs to certify coaches, and a number of universities and graduate schools now offer courses and degree programs in coaching. One book has called all of this a “coaching revolution.”⁷ It is a revolution that shows no signs of slowing down.

Despite this growth and exploding popularity, coaching still draws puzzled stares from people who have never heard of its existence. The coaching books in my library all have definitions, some of which are long and more confusing than enlightening. At its core, coaching equips people to move from where they are toward the greater competence and fulfillment they desire. Stated concisely, coaching is the art and practice of enabling individuals and groups to move from where they are to where they want to be. Coaching helps people expand their visions, build their confidence, unlock their potential, increase their skills, and take practical steps toward their goals. Unlike counseling or therapy, coaching is less threatening, less concerned about problem solving, and more inclined to help people reach their potentials.

In the future, people who are not coaches will not be promoted.

— JACK WELCH, former chairman and CEO of General Electric

Coaching is not for those who need therapy to overcome disruptive painful influences from the past; it is for relatively well-adjusted people to build vision and move forward toward the future. Coaching is not reactive looking back; it is proactive looking ahead. It is not about healing; it’s about growing. It focuses less on overcoming weaknesses and more on building skills and strengths. Usually coaching is less formal than the therapist-patient relationship and more of a partnership between two equals, one of whom has skills, experiences, or perspectives that can be useful to the other.

HOW DOES COACHING DIFFER FROM COUNSELING?

Counselors help people deal with problems such as depression, anxiety, inner turmoil, and conflicts with others. Some people come for counseling because of their grief, guilt, insecurities, feelings of failure, or inability to control their anger, addictions, or sexual struggles. Issues such as these imply that something in life is wrong, missing, or needing to be fixed. These are topics that mental health counselors and researchers have studied for many years. They are issues that have dominated the work and writing of pastoral counselors. All of these topics relate to what has come to be known as negative psychology. The goal in most cases is to bring counselees from their negative experiences and difficulties into a place in which they are well functioning, better able to cope, and living lives that are more positive and not plagued by problems.

Because these problems differ in their severity and intensity, it can be helpful to put them on an imaginary scale from -1 to -10, with -10 being the worst. For example, a marriage problem might not be very serious or disruptive (-2 or -3), or it might be dominated by intense conflict including violence (-9 or -10). Counselors are skilled in understanding and helping people overcome the issues of negative psychology regardless of the severity. Christian counselors work as servants of Christ, helping others deal with the causes of their distress, get free of the symptoms, find inner peace, and experience mental and spiritual healing. The goal is to bring people to the zero point on the scale. This represents stability.

At the end of the twentieth century, a few secular psychologists and professional counselors began to speak and write about something known as positive psychology. These writers argued that traditional psychology has focused too much on the negative issues in life and ignored more positive issues, such as hope, creativity, optimism, courage, responsibility, forgiveness, and other issues that make life worth living. According to the founder of this new movement, positive psychology aims to change the focus of psychology “from preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building positive qualities.”⁸ Within only a few years, positive psychology has grown sig...