Which Style Of Coaching Is Best For You?

Because there is such a variety of personality types, life coaching requires the same range of methods to help people reach their goals. For some, short-term therapy driven by direct problem solving helps best to attain goals. For others, they need their life coach to focus on their current problem-solving strategies in order to improve them and reach their goals. This can be an obstacle for those who are searching for a life coach, though, because it can be hard to tell if a certain method will be productive and help them produce real results.

A study from the International Coaching Federation, published by Anthony M. Grant of the University of Sydney, compared the difference in the effectiveness of solution-driven and problem-driven life coaching in a randomized experiment.

For this experiment, life coaches asked 225 randomized psychology students to state a problem and a personal goal to solve that problem. The students were then randomly split into problem- and solution-focused personal life coaching groups.

In these life coachings, the students in the solution-focused group were asked questions that emphasized their strengths and positive qualities that should be utilized in problem-solving. They were also asked to visualize a solution to their problem, and to act based on how to manifest that vision.

By contrast, the students in the problem-focused life coaching group were asked questions that were meant to critique and improve their current problem-solving methods. This way, the students had to depend on self-motivation and determination to solve their problems while being guided by their coach, whereas the solution-driven coaching sessions’ motivation was rooted in visualizing success and making changes to reach it.

After the coaching sessions, in both groups, each student was asked to numerically rate their perceived positive and negative affects, self-efficacy, and overall goal attainment as a result of the trainings, and the results of these ratings over the duration of the study are telling. What Grant found was that the solution-focused life coaching groups demonstrated “significantly greater increases in goal approach compared to the problem-focused group, . . .  indicating that the solution-focused group had higher positive affect scores.”

Although both strategies in life coaching showed improvements in the subjects’ goal attainment, it is clear that subjects, in general, responded better when they were uplifted, and made to believe that reaching their goal was totally possible.

Remember, though, coaching should be conducted based on which standards you value most. Self-efficacy, positive and negative reactions, and whether or not you attain your goals are the outcomes that Grant chose to measure in his studies into the effectiveness of life training. If you know which outcomes you value most, then tailor your life coaching search to those. Overall, Grant’s study does serve as a general indicator of which life coaching methods work best for most people.