3 reasons I found coaching more effective than training

A human being learns from the day he is born and a major part of the learning comes through experience.

To corroborate the experience, formal learning is imparted through various ways in one’s life. School and university education is introduced in the early years to equip with life skills and subject expertise for taking up future roles.

In organizations, specific interventions are also introduced to enhance the delivery of the workforce.

In my 17 years experience in corporate, I went through many trainings but no coaching intervention. In the last two years, I had the opportunity to undergo both professional coaching and training with multiple sessions.

Here are 3 top reasons why I prefer coaching to training:

It address what I want – As a consumer sitting in front of a trainer or a coach, my thought reverberates, “what’s in it for me”? Coaching does not assume and instead asks me what I want to accomplish in each session. It is designed for meeting what I want. The agenda is neither of the trainer or the organization.

The ICF core competencies require, a coach to act in response to what the client wants to accomplish throughout this session.

A trainer generally works with a given agenda and may not reflect the client’s interest that day.

Awareness of how I feel – Coaching is based on active listening, questioning and probing. It requires a relevant response from the client. The questions are meaningful, relatable and help to unravel more of what the client feels.

Training could be transactional with the focus on the doing part even though the trainer maintains active engagement by keeping the content interesting and having action based learning.

Focus on the person rather than the problem – Any intervention should help in moving forward on the objective. Coaching works with the person as a whole and helping them unravel their own thought process and belief systems. Once an individual is aware, the action steps are more committed and the chance of falling into inertia from the earlier belief systems reduces.

If the training is based on the belief systems of the trainer, the impact or shift in participants may be less meaningful.

Albert Einstein said, “Once you stopped learning, you start dying.” It is imperative that individuals and organizations commit to regularity in learning and development for themselves and their personnel, be it coaching or training.