What makes a trainer a coach?
Teacher
Trainer
Mentor
Coach
All of those expressions are used as synonyms, but there are clear defined differences. To understand these, we dive deep into what the definitions include. My goal: you know whom to look for if you want specific outcomes.
Teacher
A teacher shows you the basic ideas of a subject and helps you to build a knowledge foundation by guiding some practice. He often does this by giving you homework containing repetition of the learned topic.
You are supposed to do this homework in a 0 to 1 way, meaning either you do it or you don’t.
As you have a clear hierarical structure between the teacher as a knowledgecarrier and the student as consumer of knowledge, you fullfill the expectation or not.
The knowledge transfer is clearly structured and there is little to no room for exploration.
If there are low digging questions about the topic, they can be answered. But when the depth of asking questions increases or goes outside of the scope of the subject questions usually can’t be answered.
Teachers tend to be specialized in one to two subjects. They know the most popular ideas, sometimes they are at the frontier of what’s new and they are trained in expressing those topics. They think and talk in the way like specialists in a given subject.
Often times they have two buckets of thinking about cognitive/theoretical problems:
- I can use the frameworks I know to solve this problem.
Hence I can solve the problem by the fitting idea, because I know it is proven that it works.
- I can’t use the frameworks I know to solve this problem.
Hence I need to find proven ideas to solve this problem if it has implications on me or my subject. But if it has no implications I don’t need to concern myself with the issue. I am better suited to solve other issues, which fit to my subject.
This is provocatively phrased, but often times rings true. Whenever you meet somebody not being able to explain why something different isn’t working in their proposed solution, you find a teacher.
Teachers are great to get to the top 10%, if they are really good maybe even top 5% of a learning peer-group. But after that you have accumulated enough knowledge to be a teacher yourself in this subject.
If you want to push yourself further up the mastery tree, your goal needs to be finding the gaps in your knowledge and plug them. Next step beyond is evolving knowledge, that you can’t get from others and developing new connections between your learned information.
Maybe at this point of learning you recognize, your skillrelated-processes are not optimized yet. Or you think you know or do something, but you know as well, that you do not do it as good as possible or can’t grasp information as easy as you could.
Trainer
Here comes the trainer. He goes into the processes and helps you improving them with his given knowledge about the process. He adjusts your routines and way of thinking according to his best understanding about the structural build of the subject.
A trainer walks beside you, and reminds you of the training steps, you have agreed on.
This contains giving you homework as well. But he assures himself, that you know how to do it and supports you by adjusting after you got into practising.
He usually knows the stuff he is talking about as he either has multiple clients he got success with or he does the training himself. Different ideas that don’t initially resonate with his ideas are not directly discarded as they might improve his specific knowledge and improve success of his methodical approach.
To sum it up: a trainer helps you during your practice to become better. He teaches you basic concepts in a direct knowledge transfer by showing you the right answers to the questions in focus. Then he gives you space to practice them to revise later for further improvements.
Mentor
Mentor. Such a significant and meaningful word. And so commonly used just to describe somebody of an older age, who shows you an easy trick or two, which in the best case alter your reality. The tricks often base more on experience than on common studying material.
You meet a mentor in irregular intervals or in long intervals such as once every quarter. A mentor usually is somebody who is older than the mentee, has gone a way that might be highly valued and might have taken a long time to walk. Most often they come with a lot of life experience and have seen a lot – ups and downs! Some are considered experts in their profession, but sometimes they are just experienced in life.
They tend to ask questions to understand your situation to link it to specific knowledge they have. As they know how to teach people and are trained in leading, they help you by showing anecdotes. They give you space to find your own way after the exchange. And sometimes you find the the next stepping stones together and what to look out for. They decide which method of defining the next steps is better for you according to their experience and guide you in that direction.
The process of doing your thing is completely yours. They do not interfere or adjust. They just encourage you to do your thing after accompanying your process of decision-making.
Coach
The last form we haven’t talked about yet is the coach.
A coach is somebody who supports the process of evolving the way of thinking of the coachee. The basis of a coaching is always, that there is a jointly clearly defined goal between the coach and the coachee. Just as well as a clear time frame for exactly this defined goal.
Neverthelesssome coaches take in „permanent“ clients. With those there are high intense development periods and adjustment periods. The definition of goals and the definition of the timeframe is overlapping those periods.
The better the coachee becomes, the harder it becomes to teach him: an expert in the topics he is in needs an expert to teach. With amateurs the coach needs to resort to teaching.
In the ongoing coaching process, the coach explores regularly, together with his coacheethe deviations between the coachees expections about the goal and the real results he is getting. Sometimes it is simply by letting the coachee explain his train of thoughts and questioning the aspects which don’t walk hand in hand with each other. Sometimes on the other hand it is asking further reaching out questions without a clear goal in mind and no indirect answer or direction included, just trying to find a line in the thoughts of the coachee and carving out the facts out of the chaos.
By helping the coachee organize the thoughts the coach identifies the direction the team has to go to reach the defined goal. This enables the coach to ask guiding questions, which lead the coachee to this direction. At this point, the coachee uses the toolbox of a trainer, to reach the defined goal.
That’s why coaching is very demanding. A coach can’t be an expert in every topic a client might come up with. Especially not if a client is an expert on the edge of his field. But a coach doesn’t have to be. The ability to ask the right questions is even more important at that point. Cause the knowledge of the coachee isn’t in the center of the coaching process. More it is handling behavioural habits in dealing with knowledge and development. The coach has to understand the basic reasoning of the client, adapt his methods to accompany the coachee in making decisions and support the coachee translating them into his own personal reality.
At the start of any coaching career, coaches build up their own basic framework of methods, which can be adapted to the needs of a client. Similar to a trainer. After some time this framework expands and new and widened modules arise. Each of these modules has the scope of a trainingtype from a trainer. They can be used, when needed.
But now it seems a coach is just using his toolbox. A common prejudice, that sadly is often true. A really good coach asks questions to get to the bottom of issues. It can be something seemingly completely unrelated to the coachees actual goal he wants to achieve. And this is what makes coaching so fascinating. The coach, together with the coachee, finds the most optimized solution for the personal primary issue, not necessarily from a toolbox, but perhaps based on it. But the chosen method gets specifically tailored to the wants and needs during the process of coaching. And so it is getting a unique solution for the coachee.