Who am I as a Coach?

by Anca Voaides Coanda, Alumni and Certified Coach, One 2 Coach

Who am I as a coach ?… I am sitting down and thinking about what actually am I as a coach. I talk about coaching almost every day in different contexts – at the office, in conversations with others accompanied by coffee, with my mom.

The coaching has long ago passed the professional frontier and is filling my life in a surprising way. It happens that my mother is calling me and says, “Anca, I have an issue, I do not want an advice, I want to coach me.” I sometimes have coaching conversations with my partner and, unlike what “canons” are saying (it’s not good to do coaching with your life partner), for us as a couple these dialogues where we are curiously listening and asking each other questions are helping us a lot and allow us to become, separate and together, wiser and more conscious.

My relationship with coaching started more than six months ago. Why did I choose to do this training? I very much wanted to do this because I think that every human being is an important resource and has value.

During this training period as a coach I have realized about the mission, the values, the inspiration, the treasure that exists in every human being, waiting to be discovered; and about coaching as a nearly magic dialogue in which a human being (the coach) offers support to another human being(the coachee) to discover their own treasure/gifts.

During this training, I have made for the first time an exercise that changed my life – I discovered my personal values ​​and formulated my mission in life. There I learned about myself that I am a “supporter for self-knowledge” – that this is what I want to have as purpose in life and to have this role in the lives of others.

For me, the coaching is a way of being in relationship with others. It is the art of listening in order to understand, not to fight. It’s the ability not to judge. It is the virtue of being “not disappointed ever”, as somebody dear to me was saying. It is the privilege of accompanying another human being on his/her path of his/her own becoming, always knowing that that road is not mine and that my role as a coach is not of a guide but of a partner.

As a coach, I want to offer to my client a dialogue in which in he/she can become aware of the interferences with his/her potential and eliminate them. I want to offer a conversation in which to ask curious questions meant to generate revelations in him/her-self. I have the role of putting a mirror in front of the coachee- to become aware of his/her own limits and the inner resources that she/he has.

Above all, coaching is working with yourself. For me it meant profound transformation. It gave me more confidence and trust in the potential and the value in every human being that I am encountering.

It gave me the assurance that we can all learn and we can all overcome our limits. It made me a better listener. It taught me to be truly present, body and mind in every conversation that I have. It has generated a deeper and more honest dialogue with myself.

In those months I have learned that the only condition for someone, anyone, to benefit from the tremendous transformation that coaching brings is to really want it.

I am absolutely convinced that the process of transformation can happen in many ways. Coaching is just one of them. However, I think it is a path worth exploring, being built on the simplest and most used human capacity – the dialogue.

Who am I as a coach? I am Anca with a sincere availability for listening, with the ability to refrain from judging and with the courage to ask those questions that really matter not to me but to the other person in front of me.