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.