A coach asks questions and acts as a mirror, an advocate, and a compassionate critic to reveal and challenge your habitual ways of being and thinking. Coaching opens up ways to change that so you can create the results you want. That's why it is so effective in situations where the usual remedies don't seem to help because the usual remedies are usually part of the problem.
You can get an idea of how it works from this model:
Observer --> Action --> Result
At any given moment, the observer that you are can see certain actions you might take to produce a desired result. Sometimes you cannot see any available actions that will produce the result you want. But what if you were a different observer? You might well see a whole new universe of possible actions.
Performance coaching supports change at the level of action. You can see from the model that if you change your action you will change the result you get. I prefer to work at the level of the OBSERVER (that's you--the client). When you shift as an observer, you generate a new range of possible actions, radically expanding your opportunities for effective and engaging choices.