Coaching and mentoring are crucial ingredients for success in almost every endeavor. At first, the coachee needs to learn technical skills to succeed, but later, they must learn how to navigate more complex areas with many shades of grey. For instance, coachees might need to figure out how to find fulfillment and happiness in the midst of competing demands in work and family. There is no black-and-white answer for these. Fortunately, the authors of this book offer a general framework to teach readers how to “coach” others through such complex, often-difficult decisions and conversations.

The authors distinguish coaching from mentoring. In their terms, “coaching” is about helping coachees come up with their own solutions while “mentoring” is about providing answers to problems. I’m not sure that such hard distinctions need to be at play all the time; sometimes good relationships themselves can lead to common insights that spawn purely from a conversation of equals. Nonetheless, these distinctions can provide a framework for managers and professionals to help others come to better solutions for their lives.

This book fully embraces recent concepts like emotional intelligence and the idea of a knowledge worker. In this domain, everyone is an expert, and coaches need not have all the answers. This resembles the modern workplace of teamwork more than the older paradigm of a singular, all-knowing oracle of wisdom. It also incorporates essential skills of leadership like listening, curiosity, and self-management.

While reading, I found myself fighting through emotions of more traditional forms of mentors in trying to understand how I could be more effective in my relationships at work and in life. All this benefitted me because it taught me enhanced self-control in these relationships. This way of seeing coaching relationally seems to have been well-accepted because this book is in its fourth edition. Of course, there will always be those who always resist change, but I found the authors’ suggested views helpful and true to my experience.

Anyone interested in helping out others, whether formally or informally, can benefit from reading this work. Obviously, coaching is intertwined with leadership. Managers, sports coaches, organizational leaders, professional coaches, and life coaches represent just some of the niches of life that this book’s orientation to coaching can address. While not specifically addressed in this book, I believe even others like teachers and religious teachers can also benefit. It’s helpful to first think of someone, “How can I help them become a better version of themselves?” instead of “What can I teach them?” This essentially conveys how this book teaches us to coach those around us. ( )

It provides very good information on different types of coaching, different frameworks to view coaching through, and ample example dialogues. ( )