As I was heading back home, I wondered – is coaching something we do or the way we are? So once I got home, I looked up the definition for both words (coach & coaching) and came across Visual Thesaurus (image below).

The reason I was wondering is that when I meet people who “do coaching”, they always say “I’m a coach”. I’m not actually disputing that they are (or aren’t) coaches, it’s just that I wonder if they have assimilated the coaching role so much as to BECOME coaches. Maybe it’s simply like someone who defines himself as being an accountant, an engineer or a clown when in reality it is because their day-job is accounting, engineering or clowning.

This leads me to wonder, if accountants stop doing accounting after 5 pm, does it mean coaches stop coaching after work hours? It seems to me, based on the many coaches I personally know that very few actually stop coaching – that’s almost a way of being – coaching the kids, sometime the spouse, some of the friends and so on.

Should we call ourselves coaches only when we are on duty or is there a better name to describe bipeds who provide coaching to people around them?

Personally, I have decided a while back that I do not define myself as a coach. Coaching is simply a tool for me – a very effective one, I would add – that I use to help people accomplish their objectives.