Selecting Coaches and mentors
Coaches come from many backgrounds
Coaches come from all kinds of backgrounds and professions. Not surprisingly, coaches tend to like people, and many coaches come from ‘people’ and ‘caring’ professions.
Coaches come from backgrounds as varied as these, and the list is certainly not exhaustive:
| Teaching | Complementary Therapies |
| Nursing | Human Resources |
| Management | Personal Trainers |
| Consulting | Voluntary workers |
| Prison Service | Charity workers |
| Therapy | Armed forces |
| Counselling | Emergency services |
| Training | Service industries |
And many people on business, institutions, management, and organisations of all sorts learn how to become coaches to enrich their existing roles with the very special skills, methodologies and philosophies that coaching entails.
Poor coaches and mentors, by contrast, use their position to:
- exaggerate their importance or the level of their knowledge
- intimidate learners
- undercut aspects of the organisation’s process or outputs.
