COACHES AS PROBLEM DEFINERS AND SOLVERS Part I

Problems— what is the relationship between coaching and problems? Is there any? Recently someone asked me a question that truly surprised me: “You mentioned ‘problems’ a little bit ago, isn’t that reverting to therapy? Isn’t that a distinction between coaching and therapy, coaches do not deal with problems, therapists deal with problems. Right?”

I was generally surprised because neither I nor any of the Meta-Coach Trainers have never made that distinction. And because it mis-understands the therapy—coaching differentiation, I expanded my response in the following way: “Well, no, actually there are therapy problems and there are coaching problems. And there’s nothing inherent to a ‘problem’ that necessarily makes it a factor of therapy. Regular people also have problems. And that’s great. We are a problem-solving species. We need problems! Take problems away from a movie and the movie becomes excruciatingly boring. Take problems away from human being and they begin to invent problems to solve —crossword puzzles, math problems, interactive computer games that offer problems to solve. We need problems. And self-actualizing people are especially turned-on and excited by problems. Problems activate untapped potentials!”