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David Taylor is quite open about the fact that anyone can be a business coach. There's no great secret to it, he told the London Business Forum. In fact, you're doing it already. "When you give advice, when you lead people, when you inspire your teams or don't inspire your teams, when you are at home with your children." All the people in your life, he suggested, ask themselves continually whether you believe in what you're doing or saying. And if they decide that you do, "they are more likely to copy what you're doing or saying than anything else."

Coaching shouldn't be a discrete discipline but an everyday behaviour in business, he suggested. It is "any and every intervention that enables people, teams and organisations to be their very best." Indeed, the idea of a "coaching guru" is bogus. A good, professional coach is simply someone who chooses the right interventions so that a client can achieve peak performance for themselves.

"I was at the Birmingham NEC recently, in front of about a thousand people," he said, "and the chairman [of the event] turned to them and said: 'We've got David Taylor here today. He's going to inspire every single one of you.' Have you ever seen a thousand people fold their arms at exactly the same moment?" In the US, he pointed out, there's less scepticism and cynicism. For example, when he told a large audience in San Francisco that "it doesn't matter what your age, your background, your experience - every single thing you need to achieve everything you want, you already have within you," everyone stood up and started cheering. "It was without doubt the most frightening moment of my life," he said.

Nevertheless, it's obvious that Taylor is used to whipping up enthusiasm among his clients. Frequently, during this event, he left the stage to march up and down the aisles of the British Library Conference Centre. He wanted to look us in the eyes and draw reactions from us directly, to ensure he had our full attention. Clearly, he preferred individual contact and the intimacy of small groups. Indeed, he told us that although he had coached powerful teams such as the board of BP, he was daunted by the idea of boosting the performance of an entire auditorium.

"I believe that to be in a formal coaching situation in a business environment, somebody has to have had some experience of being there and doing it," he said, explaining that although the coach doesn't need to be as talented as the client, they need to have worked at the client's level in their own career. "If you're looking for somebody to coach you, your projects or your teams, I would look for somebody who's made mistakes, and who admits to those mistakes," he added. You want a coach who can steer you around the pitfalls that they once fell into.

Equally, the client has to have the "power" in the relationship, he advised. "There are too many coaches, there are too many authors, there are too many gurus, who stand up and say: 'You know what, I've discovered some stuff that you haven't.' The power has to be with the person being coached, not the person doing the coaching, every time." He explained that coaches who specialise in particular techniques - such as neuro-linguistic programming - will invariably recommend solutions based on their own specialty, to the exclusion of other options that may be more appropriate. A good coach, he said, has "a toolkit that is ready to respond to whatever issue comes up."

The third key ingredient in successful coaching is being able to identify and leverage "moments of truth", Taylor said. "When you're in a formal or informal meeting, or even a discussion stage, and you sense a 'moment of truth', that's the most powerful moment and what you do next is absolutely key, in terms of helping that person." Such a moment occurred while he was at BP, he recalled. "I happened to be with them the day Lord Browne resigned... And that was a moment of truth for the organisation." If you can identify such moments - or even engineer positive ones - then you can use them as opportunities to intervene and make an "extraordinary" difference.

Finally, he said, a coach must transfer skills and knowledge to their clients. If they fail to do so then they will merely create dependencies, and not sustainable improvements in performance.

Common sense should be in evidence throughout the coaching relationship, he continued. No coach has a generic method that works for every client under all possible circumstances. But there is a general statement of intent that applies to everyone: "Know where you want to go and who you want to be; know where you are now; know what you have to do to get to where you want to go, or who you want to be; and then do it."

It was these steps that Taylor used as a structure for the rest of the event, in his attempt to improve the performance of the entire audience.

1. Know where you want to go and who you want to be

The key thing here from a leadership perspective is to "have a massive dream," Taylor advised. "And be very clear what the outcome of that dream is." For Sir Terry Matthews, the Welsh technology billionaire, the dream was for Wales to host the Ryder Cup. Twenty years ago, Taylor pointed out, everyone laughed at this ambition. But now it's due to become a reality, in 2010. "If you have a dream, go home and share it with somebody, and the key to whether that dream is right for you is how much they laugh," he said. "Ideally, your family will just roll around the house."

On a more practical level, it's important to "focus on what you want, not what you don't want," he said. "This is not [merely] positive thinking... If you focus on what you want you'll move towards it, and if you focus on what you don't want then you'll move towards that. Because your mind cannot tell the difference between a dream you have and a reality you have." As Dominic O'Brien, the world memory champion, said: "The day I became champion was the day I decided I had a great memory."

At this point, Taylor asked everyone in the audience to reveal their biggest ambitions to the nearest stranger. Why? "Because the statistics do not lie." Research from Warwick Business School, he said, shows that: "If you make a commitment to yourself - say, a New Year's Resolution - you have got an 8% chance of seeing it through. If you make a commitment to a loved-one, that soars to 18%... If you make a commitment to a stranger or a business colleague, who you don't really see each and every day, it soars to 79%." Get your new "buddy" to call you on your ambition, and the next steps you've agreed to take towards it, and you'll find it much easier to make progress.

2. Know where you are now

This is the most emotionally challenging part of coaching, Taylor said, because it means asking the question: 'Are you in ownership of your life?' "By the way," he added, "if you're not in ownership of your life, it might be an idea to find out who is, and give them a ring."

What does ownership mean in this context? It means accepting "total accountability and responsibility for anything or everything that ever happens to you. And one of the challenges in organisations is that sometimes people don't take that level of ownership."

We're held back primarily by the fear of failure, he suggested. And one of the ways you can overcome this fear is to attach an alternative meaning to the noun "failure" itself. "Terry Leahy of Tesco says that whenever anybody ever mentions the word failure to him, he thinks of a six-inch Irish leprechaun, doing a jig in the corner of whichever office he's in," he revealed. Another technique is to spend a day being unremittingly positive and the next being unremittingly negative, then emulate whichever type of behaviour you enjoyed more.

Alternatively, "when you hear a piece of music that really inspires you, just touch your thumb and first finger together," Taylor advised. Eventually, whenever you perform the same physical action, you will have the same mental reaction as before, and "any time you want to feel inspired, you just touch your thumb and finger together." It's a technique used by the England football captain John Terry.

3. Know what you have to do to get to where you want to go, or who you want to be

Getting this step right means "making true decisions", Taylor said. "Decide what it is you're going to achieve, and then close off all other possibilities... If you have a plan B in life, you will hit it almost every time."

The reluctance of UK managers to make "true decisions" was damaging the country's competitiveness, he argued. "I think it's seriously time in our organisations - public- and private-sector - to stop messing around and wasting so much time socialising," he said. "A CEO said to me recently: 'What would have happened if an IT manager had been at the helm of the Titanic?' I said: 'I don't know.' He said: 'It would have missed the iceberg completely... by two years.'"

4. Do it

The final step in the formula was the simplest piece of common sense that Taylor had to deliver. Implementing your dreams is "the most difficult [thing] to complete successfully, and the one that's the most important," he said. And it boils down to persistence. Whenever you do anything, he concluded, ask yourself whether it helps you, your team, your family, your organisation. "If it helps, do more of the same, and if it doesn't, do something else... I know for a fact that individuals who succeed at anything - be it business, be it financial, be it relationships - show a persistence that wipes failure off their lexicon."