Three Levels of Coaching

¶ … Life Coaching

According to Weiss (2004), life coaching exists on three levels. The first level focuses on assisting clients with accomplishing concrete, specific tasks and achieving short-term goals. In this modality, the coach often holds the client accountable for performing certain actions such as creating a resume to apply for a job or exercising. Most people view the coach as providing an external stimulus to complete tasks they have difficulty accomplishing, much like a coach urges players to train harder than they would on their own impetus. "Coaching at this level is coaching as accountability partnership -- helping our clients to clarify their goals, laying out a set of action steps to move them toward those goals, and then setting up structures to ensure that they stay on track" (Weiss 2004: 4). Sometimes a simple call is enough to help a client focused. Weiss (2004) notes that external rewards only go so far to achieve results. Rewarding employees with a pizza party every Friday if they meet specific goals might be motivational for a short time but eventually the value of the extrinsic reward decreases in value if it is repeatedly used over time.

Level two coaching involves encouraging people to develop new competencies. This empowers clients to be able to work on their own, to perceive and develop new goals in the field of opportunities in front of them. This entails teaching them how to do things, not merely prodding them to accomplish specific actions. For example, for someone who wants to lose weight, rather than simply taking them to task for over-eating and not exercising, a counselor would strive to teach them about nutrition and coming up with proactive solutions to add activities to their day or help them rediscover the sports they enjoyed as a child. "Our aim here is to teach them how to do something, rather than just telling them what to do. This requires more skill on our part, and it takes more time, more patience, and a deeper relationship with the client" (Weiss 2004: 6).

Level three coaching shifts away from focusing on the issue and is more about focusing on the person: why the client wants the things he/she desires. If the original goal is to find a better-paying job, the life coach might explore more deeply the role of material goods in the client's life. For someone who struggles with their weight, this stage might involve understanding why the client became overweight in the first place and reevaluating the role of food in the individual's life. "Our aim is to shift their limited sense of who they are, so that they can engage in and interact with the world in entirely new ways" (Weiss 2004: 6). Quite often, people have a very limited sense of their own competencies and possibilities and it requires the eyes of another in the form of a counselor to open up their perspective.