Socrates - the world's first coach?

 

Many people believe that coaching began, fairly informally, in businesses sometime between the 1930s and 1960s.

 

However I was recently struck by the similarity between the Socratic Method and coaching. The Socratic Method was pioneered by Socrates, who was told that he was the wisest man in Greece. He felt this was a paradox, and began to teach his students by asking them questions rather than telling them answers. 

 

Of course, Socrates’ method was as much about philosophy as business, but it still holds much in common with coaching. Socrates believed that questions could stimulate thinking and illuminate ideas. Just like coaching, he also pioneered a very practical form of philosophy, with theoretical ideas discussed in the context of examples from everyday life.

 

Within the Socratic Method much is made of the way in which you can firm up someone’s thoughts by challenging them. This too holds true for coaching, where a good coach will play devil’s advocate against a certain decision or course of action in order to ensure that it is the right plan.

 

 

The best source of information about the Socratic Method is from The Socratic Dialogues, which are available online here. Indeed, within the dialogues there’s so much in common with coaching it’s hard to believe that Socrates was questioning and challenging back in 5^th century BC.

 

So what do you do the next time someone infers that coaching is an upstart new profession? Just let them know it’s already 2,400 years old.