What is Coaching?

By Ken Norton

Executive coaching is distinct from advising, consulting, training, or mentoring. The differences can be subtle and further complicated because many people who call themselves coaches actually provide one or more of these other services. This is especially the case in the product world, where “product coaching” has become quite popular, but has more in common with mentoring or consulting than with coaching as it has traditionally been defined. (See What Coaching is Not at the bottom of this page for more about the differences.)

It’s no surprise that many people who contact me are unfamiliar with coaching – unless you’re a Fortune 500 CEO, few of us have encountered it in our professional lives. People new to executive coaching often expect to bring questions and hope that their coach will have the answers. They are surprised to discover that coaching is precisely the opposite – coaches are usually the ones asking the questions, while clients are providing the answers. But here’s the good news: when exposed to coaching, most people recognize how much more powerful it can be than advising, consulting, or mentoring and open up to it quickly. Like an innovative product, people don’t know to ask for coaching because they don’t know it exists. That’s my responsibility – to make sure potential clients understand what executive coaching is all about before they hire me. I wrote this article if you’re new to executive coaching to make it easier to understand the differences and make sure it’s what you’re genuinely seeking before you hire a coach.

The distinction between content and context is the most foundational – if not the foundational – concept to understanding my approach to executive coaching. In brief, content is the situation itself (the “what”) and context is everything that influences how you approach that situation (the “how”).

To illustrate this, let’s imagine a real-world challenge that someone might bring to coaching. Lisa is the CEO of a Series B SaaS software startup, and David is the Chief Product Officer. After two years of explosive growth, revenue has slowed. The board has begun putting pressure on Lisa to focus on margins and cut costs. Lisa has charged David with putting together a plan to improve gross margins from 70% to 75% while maintaining their aggressive ARR targets. David has prepared a detailed presentation for Lisa with the help of his departmental leaders.

Everything I’ve just described in the last paragraph is content. Content is the who, what, when, where, and how that consumes your attention and energy in life. The charts and graphs, the ARR goals, the roadmap, the experiments, the margins, and all of the ideas and proposals Lisa and David will be discussing. The perspectives of the board, the timelines for the Series C raise, who on David’s team will implement it, all of that. Anything and everything Lisa and David talk about over coffee and late night pizza. Who will do what by when. It’s all content.

Meanwhile, David spent the entire weekend riddled with anxiety. He’s nervous because he knows deep down the possibility of hitting these product-led growth goals is a total pipe dream. He believes this because his twenty years of experience tell him there’s always a tradeoff. You can’t eat your cake and have it too. But he’s afraid to reveal that to Lisa because he’s worried she doesn’t want to hear it. He knows she’s experiencing pressure from the board, and he’s telling himself a story that she’s not interested in hearing any bad news. She wants him to give her a plan, and he won’t be the one to tell her no. David is unaware that this is a lifelong pattern of his.

This is also bringing up dark memories from his childhood. The words “cost-cutting” make him wonder if there will be layoffs. Will he need to cut jobs on his team? He remembers when his father got laid off when he was a teenager and how devastating that was to his family. He can’t imagine having to put anyone else’s family through that. He’s also keenly aware that this job was going to be the launching pad to CEO. He needs this company to be successful, it has to work out. This belief touches on deep questions of identity, and what it means to David to be considered a success or a failure.

All of that is context. Context is how you are being with the content of your life. It’s the place from which you are having those conversations about the who, what, when, where, and how. How David is being with the content. Put another way, if content is everything on the movie screen of our life, context is the lens through which we are seeing and experiencing it.

Imagine David sits down with someone eager to help but who only focuses on the content. Perhaps a product-led growth advisor who brings decades of content experience to the table. They might have useful frameworks for making ARR and margin tradeoffs. They’ve probably been in the trenches many times in similar situations. They have lots of advice on dealing with demanding CEOs and maybe even how to frame tradeoffs to early-stage boards of directors. They might even be able to share examples of PowerPoint presentations from other startups they’ve worked with! All of that can be really helpful, and I’m sure would be beneficial to David. But we can see how they’d be missing the mark because they’re oblivious to David’s context in this situation, which is where the real challenge for him resides.

An emphasis on context is one of the most important things differentiating coaching from content-focused practices such as consulting, advising, training, or mentoring. Clients can bring whatever content they want to our sessions (issues, problems, concerns, questions, opportunities). The content can be professional or personal. It’s up to them to decide what it is they want to talk about and explore. The topic is theirs to choose. Context is the place from which we’ll be having the conversation about the content. In coaching, we’ll be just as interested, if not more interested, in the context. Whereas a consultant or advisor would stick to the content, we’ll delve deep into both in coaching.

In coaching, we have the opportunity to explore how David really feels, what stories he’s developed, what he truly wants, and what unconscious belief systems and patterns he needs to overcome to get there. Most leaders are focused most of the time on content. And most leaders are content experts, certainly David is.

But through coaching, David can learn to be just as aware of his context as the content. Developing those skills will help the content to resolve itself much more quickly. Focusing on context will help reveal inner stories, blind spots, unconscious belief systems, and patterns that keep us stuck or anchored in conflict, drama, and the behavior we want to change. When we only pay attention to content, it can feel like we occasionally make progress and solve problems, but issues keep recycling. Shifting from content to context is the key to unlocking growth and transformation as a human being.

As a coach of leaders, I further maintain that while most leaders are content experts, becoming a great leader requires learning to pay as much attention to context as content in the workplace and your personal life. We’ll work on developing those skills.

If this makes sense to you, learn more about my executive coaching or get started.