What is coaching?

International Coaching Federation defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Coaching is a client-driven process. The coach’s responsibility is to:

  • Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve
  • Encourage client self-discovery
  • Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
  • Hold the client responsible and accountable

The coaching process helps clients improve their outlook on work and life, while improving their leadership skills and unlocking their potential.

What is coaching (REALLY)?

  • Raising awareness when words and actions don’t align
  • Confidential conversation to help you move forward
  • Nonjudgmental and unbiased space to brainstorm and experiment
  • Re-connect with who you are and what’s important to you
  • Setting goals, creating outcomes, and making sustainable changes

Is coaching a good fit for you?

Since coaching is a partnership, ask yourself whether collaboration, other viewpoints and new perspectives are valued. Also, are you ready to engage and be brave? Are you willing to let go of belief systems that don’t serve you? The world around us is changing faster than ever before. Are you rethinking your skills with ease and optimism? If the answer is yes, then coaching may be a beneficial way to develop and grow.

How is coaching distinct from other service professions?

Executive coaching focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes, and managing personal change. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand coaching by distinguishing it from other personal or organizational support professions.

• Therapy: Therapy deals with healing pain, dysfunction, and conflict within an individual or in relationships. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past that hamper an individual’s emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with the present in more emotionally healthy ways. Coaching, on the other hand, supports personal and professional growth based on self-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. Coaching is future-focused, and the coaching relationship emphasizes action, accountability, and follow-through.

• Consulting: Individuals or organizations retain consultants for their expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, the assumption is the consultant will diagnose problems and prescribe and, sometimes, implement solutions. With coaching, the assumption is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.

• Mentoring: A mentor is an expert who provides wisdom and guidance based on his or her own experience. Mentoring may include advising, counseling, and coaching. The coaching process does not include advising or counseling and focuses instead on individuals or groups setting and reaching their own objectives.

• Training: Training programs are based on objectives set out by the trainer or instructor. Though objectives are clarified in the coaching process, they are set by the individual or team being coached, with guidance provided by the coach. Training also assumes a linear learning path that coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear, without a set curriculum. Additionally, coaching does not focus on behaviors that are being executed poorly or incorrectly. Instead, the focus is on identifying opportunity for development based on individual strengths and capabilities.

What’s in it for me?

Coaching clients who responded to the 2017 ICF Global Consumer Awareness Study reported positive coaching impacts including:

  • Improved communication skills
  • Increased self-esteem/self-confidence
  • Increased productivity
  • Optimized individual/teamwork performance
  • Improved work/life balance
  • Increased well-being
  • Improved business management strategies
  • Expanded professional career opportunities
  • Accelerated on-boarding into a new professional role

What can I expect?

Life is journey and our patterns, habits, and emotions to events in our personal and professional lives have been formed along the way. Take the time to acknowledge this work can be challenging – give yourself time to reflect. Some clients experience dynamic changes quickly and many clients make significant changes in 3 to 6 sessions.

Connect

Everything begins with just a conversation. Book a complimentary 30-minute discovery session via zoom or phone call. There is no obligation for further services, and I will never pressure you to do so. If you decide to book a complimentary session, I
will email or text you a confirmation and provide a few details to start you thinking. You can also take this opportunity to ask questions and discuss whether we might be a good fit. If not, I am happy to offer referrals to other capable coaching professionals.