What is coaching?
Coaching is a journey into whatever you need to visit, unpack and recreate. This process helps clients dramatically improve their outlook on work and life while improving their leadership skills and unlocking their personal potential.
A thought-provoking and creative process that inspires you to maximize your personal and professional potential. Given the demands of today’s busy life, coaching can assist you in your life, work and business. Coaching principles allow you to be the expert of your life while being guided by a highly skilled professional.
What does a coach do?
As your coach it’s our responsibility is to:
Discover, clarify, and align with what you want to achieve from the partnership
Encourage your journey of self-discovery
Elicit your-generated solutions and strategies
Hold you responsible and accountable
How will you know if coaching is right for you?
To determine whether you could benefit from coaching, start by summarizing what you would expect to accomplish by working with a coach.
If you have a fairly clear idea great you are ready to start now.
If however like most our clients you aren’t really sure what you want to achieve rather just something in life isn’t the way you had hoped it would be. That’s also a great starting point.
How is coaching different from other service professions?
Some therapies deal with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or
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. While other professional services
provide advice and consultation and can at times be engaged because they are the go-to expert in
a field.
Professional coaching focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes and managing personal
change. Coaching supports personal and professional growth based on the self-initiated change in
pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional
success. Coaching is present and future focused not past based. While positive feelings/emotions
may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for
achieving specific goals in one’s work or personal life. The emphases are on action, accountability,
and follow through.
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.
The coaching process does not include advising or counselling and focuses instead on individuals
or groups setting and reaching their own objectives.
What are some typical reasons someone might work with a coach?
An individual might choose to work with a coach for reasons such as,
• Work and life are out of balance,
• Something urgent, exciting or challenging has occurred and there’s a need for unbiased, confidential and professional support
• A desire to move to the next level in life but uncertain on how to take the next step
• A lack of clarity with choices to be made
• Success has started to become problematic
• A gap exists in knowledge, skills, confidence or resources
• Life has become mundane and uneventful and you want more out of your future.
How is coaching delivered?
Coaching typically begins with a personal interview (either face-to-face or by phone) to assess the individual’s or business’ current opportunities and challenges, identify priorities for action, establish specific desired outcomes and see if there is a match.
Subsequent coaching sessions may be conducted in person or over the telephone, with each session lasting a previously established length of time. Between scheduled coaching sessions, the individual may be asked to complete specific actions that support the achievement of one’s personally prioritized goals. The coach may provide additional resources in the form of relevant articles, checklists, assessments or models to support the individual’s or business’ thinking and actions. The duration of the coaching relationship varies depending on needs and preferences.
What does the process look like?
A variety of concepts, models and principles drawn from the behavioral sciences, management
literature, spiritual traditions and/or the arts and humanities may be incorporated into the coaching
conversation. It’s a conversation like no other as it’s experiential-based to increase self-awareness
and awareness of others, foster shifts in perspective, promote fresh insights, provide new
frameworks for looking at opportunities and challenges, and energize and inspire forward actions.
Within the partnership, what does the coach do?
The coach:
• Provides objective assessment and observations that foster the individual’s or team’s self-awareness and awareness of others
• Listens closely to fully understand the individual’s or team’s circumstances
• Acts as a sounding board for exploring possibilities and implementing thoughtful planning and decision making
• Champions opportunities and potential, encouraging stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations
• Fosters shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives
• Challenges blind spots to illuminate new possibilities and support the creation of alternative scenarios
• Maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession’s code of ethics
Within the partnership, what does the individual do?
The individual:
• Creates the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful coaching goals
• Uses assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others
• Envisions personal and/or organizational success
• Assumes full responsibility for personal decisions and actions
• Utilizes the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives
• Takes courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations
• Engages big-picture thinking and problem-solving skills
• Takes the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by the coach and engages in effective forward actions
How do you prepare for coaching?
To be successful, it’s important that you
• Focus on self, the tough questions, the hard truths and your own success.
• Observe the behaviours and communications of those around you.
• Listen to intuition, assumptions, judgments, and to speak up about your personal fears
• Challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and develop new ones that serve your goals in a resourceful and healthy way.
• Leverage personal strengths and overcome limitations by being open to trying new things and embracing change
• Show compassion for self while learning new behaviors and experiencing setbacks, and to show that compassion for others as they do the same.
• Commit to having fun, using humour to lighten and brighten any situation.
• Take decisive actions, however uncomfortable and in spite of personal insecurities, to reach for the extraordinary.
• Have the courage to reach for more than before while engaging in continual self examination without fear.