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The International Coach Federation (ICF)—the largest professional association of coaches—defines professional coaching as an "ongoing partnership that helps clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives." Through the collaborative process of coaching, clients deepen their learning about themselves and the opportunities and issues in their lives, improve their performance, and enhance their quality of life.
However, general definitions and claims mean very little, especially because coaching is focused on what the client wants to accomplish. Therefore, the best way to understand coaching is to experience it yourself.
People seek the services of a professional coach for many reasons. They may want to improve their career performance, make better business decisions, have higher-quality relationships, be more physically fit and well, explore spiritual and personal fulfillment, set and achieve more ambitious goals, and further their financial independence. But these findings are generalizations from thousands of coaching clients. There may be something else that you want. A professional coach can help you clarify what that is, achieve it, and identify barriers to your moving toward it and then move forward.
Organizations use coaching as a way to provide personal and professional development. Studies show coaching to produce more profound and longer-lasting results than just training and/or consultation interventions alone. Organizations have discovered a key benefit to coaching is to dramatically enhance and sustain change.
A survey of coaching clients identified outcomes of self-awareness, setting better goals, achieving a more balanced life, lowering stress, self-discovery, improved self-confidence, a higher quality of life, better communication skills, and improved project completion. Again, because coaching is tailored to your specific issues, your own list of outcomes may include all of these and more. It is very likely to include at least some.
The same survey confirmed that 98.5% of coaching clients found their return on coaching to be worth the investment (70% of coaching clients rated it as very valuable, and another 28.5% rated it as valuable). Because coaching focuses on your own goals and context, determining the return on your investment is a unique process. Your coach would be able to work with you to create a measure of returns which would satisfy the demands of your situation.
People come to coaching from 3 career domains:
People working for a corporation or organization, who intend to use coaching internally
 Human Relations specialists, who employ coaching to improve interpersonal interactions among employees and to enhance performance
Managers, executives, and team leaders, with a mandate to improve team performance and cooperation, and enhance the bottom line
Teachers, who use coaching to facilitate learning and engage students
Professionals who wish to expand their skills and services to include coaching
Counselors, psychologists, social workers, and other behavioural health professionals, who want to add a powerful new technique to their professional tool kit
Mediators, for the same reason
Business consultants, who want to move from a style of advice giving to one of encouraging clients to come up with their own solutions, and/or those who want to add coaching to their service offerings.
People who wish to make a career change
Entrepreneurs, who plan to open a coaching business
Retiring professionals, who wish to extend their expertise to a new context that's flexible to meet their retirement lifestyle
Specialists, such as teachers, health care professionals, attorneys, engineers, and others, who intend to use coaching to assist others in their field of specialty
The answer would be different for each person, but generally coaching helps people change in ways they may have wanted for some time but haven't been able to accomplish. It provides a safe place for people to be honest with themselves and ambitious in their goals. Importantly, in an organizational context, coaching can be tremendously effective in building teams and improving employee relations/satisfaction.
At Adler, we help you and your colleagues learn to employ some of the powerful skills that coaches use, with many measurable results: improved performance, better relationships, and enhanced quality of life. The Adler Foundations of Coaching course introduces these basic skills in scheduled weeklong or five Saturday sessions, or onsite at your organization.
The Adler School of Professional Coaching Inc. offers a year-long program of course work and practical experience designed to equip you with the basic competencies required by the International Coach Federation (ICF). Successful completion of the Adler program entitles you to the designation "Adler Certified Professional Coach." Further experience and other requirements leading to the ICF designation "Professional Certified Coach" are described on the ICF website at www.coachfederation.org.
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