Introducing Relationship Coaching

If you want to improve a marriage that is doing poorly, what steps can you take? What works? Let's first eliminate what doesn't work. Here are common approaches to relationship improvement that don't succeed, at least not as they are often used.

Reading books that are long on advice but short on skills doesn't work. Being given a marital destination but no map of how to get there is a prescription for frustration at best. Similarly, taking relationship workshops doesn't work, no matter how inspired you feel afterward - unless the workshops offer practical guidance - which you then follow and continue to follow long after the workshop has ended.

Couples counseling doesn't work - if it focuses exclusively or even mostly on what is wrong with your relationship and produces no forceful vision of a better future to which you and your partner can commit your energies.

In fact, no approach works - not books, not workshops, not counseling - unless it provides you and your partner with new ways of relating to each other - i.e., new relationship skills - plus a structure for practicing those skills and the support you need for persevering until you achieve success.

For many couples, relationship coaching may be the best route to a better relationship. Relationship coaching is refreshingly practical: It's all about translating the impulse toward change into action - establishing specific goals, figuring out what behavior is going to achieve those goals, making and keeping action commitments and following through with the day-to-day work.

No one hires a coach unless they are either well beyond the "ain't it awful" complain-and-blame stage or determined to get there. No one hires a coach when they continue to believe that the only real problem is the other partner's behavior and the only route to a better relationship is to get that person to be different. The people who hire coaches don't want to waste time. They are willing to take responsibility for their own situation and expect to do their own work.

Traditionally - and still in most people's thinking - "coach" means "athletic coach." In reality, the behavior of personal coaches (including relationship coaches) is not far off from what an athletic coach does.

The sports coach is committed to training her athletes to perform with excellence and to win. She makes the goal of winning vivid and compelling for them. She challenges her players to exceed their sense of what is possible and accept a new and expanded notion of who they are and what they can achieve.

The sports coach encourages her players when they lose faith. She reminds them of their abilities when they forget themselves. She believes in them, demands commitment from them and ultimately works only with those who learn to expect the same from themselves.

Relationship coaching is as action-oriented, skills-based and goal-directed as is sports coaching. For both forms of coaching, skills, learned and practiced, plus dedication are essential for achieving success.

The relationship coach, like the athletic coach, attracts people who want to succeed. He, too, expects commitment from his clients, demands effort and holds his clients accountable for their behavior. He is also caring and generously supportive - there to believe in and support his clients - individuals and couples - when they lose faith in their ability to achieve their goals.

The relationship coach challenges the limited mental models his clients may have of who they are as individuals and what they can achieve in their relationship when they work together He is psychologically knowledgeable. He understands the ways in which people sabotage themselves and is able to help his clients get moving again when they become stuck.

The relationship coach is the voice of optimism for people who have experienced too much frustration and failure. His message is, "Enough negativity. You can succeed. Let's get to work. Let's do it!" The relationship coach is what most people do not otherwise have in their lives - someone who champions his clients - and their marriages and committed relationships - with skill, commitment and a determination to see them succeed.