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About Personal
Coaching
What Personal Coaching does
It helps you to get what you want more effectively by, |
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Creating a success partnership between you and the coach |
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Clarifying what it is that you really want |
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Bringing new tools and strategies to the game |
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Offering perspective and insight to your goals and methods |
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Opening up new avenues of thought and action |
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Clearing obstacles, or perceived obstacles |
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Supporting and rewarding your effectiveness |
What Personal Coaching is
Coaching is a professional relationship that creates a framework and utilizes specific processes that enhance your ability to learn, make changes and achieve desired results.
Your coach helps you to get clear about what you want to accomplish, set specific goals, make effective action plans, stay focused, and eliminate obstacles. In a coaching relationship you and your coach, analyze, prioritize, troubleshoot and brainstorm. Your coach provides structure, feedback, perspective, skill building techniques and smart questions. Together, you evaluate options, make decisions, track progress and celebrate achievements. Coaching will help you to become more congruent in your personal values, beliefs, actions and life.
How it works
Coaching can be customized to your needs. You and your coach custom-design a coaching arrangement that meets your individual needs and schedule.
The basic design often consists of: |
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A pre-coaching ‘finding fit’ meeting in which you and the coach see if it makes sense to work together. |
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An initial session to see what you want to work on and to create a coaching strategy. |
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Regular on-going coaching sessions (in person or by phone), usually for 45 minutes, and held about once each week. |
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An agreed upon time-frame depending upon your goals and the changes you wish to make. The initial time frame may be 8-12 sessions with an evaluation at the end to see if additional time is warranted. |
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Coaching sessions may be focused on one specific challenge you are facing, or on a much broader set of personal and/or professional issues. |
To schedule a FREE initial consultation click here.
What coaching is not:
Coaching is not consulting, although it can be consultative.
Traditional consulting offers answers and expertise. Coaching facilitates discovery by assisting you to find your own unique answers. Your coach provides his own expertise whenever it is useful, but never does things for you. The primary role of your coach is to listen, question, observe, pinpoint, re-frame, and articulate what’s so. The plans you make are your own.
Coaching is not teaching, although it can be educational.
Teaching tends to take the form of the instructor sharing knowledge with students. Coaching assists you in discovering the best answers for you. While teaching can fade, coaching reinforces learned concepts and skills until they become second nature. Your coach often provides skills training in the “need-to-know” moment that formal teaching misses. He also helps you discover how much you already know. You learn more by discovering answers that by hearing them.
Coaching is not therapy, although it can be therapeutic.
The focus of coaching is on taking a hard look at what a fulfilling life looks like, and then identifying specific plans, action steps and ways of thinking that will move you toward achieving your desired goals. Coaching is focused both on who you want to be in life and then on taking action; it is not focused specifically on creating healing. And yet, an outcome of coaching can be that healing occurs. It looks at the future, not the past, and emphasizes taking effective action in the present.
A few more things you should know about coaching:
The coach is not always right.
It goes without saying that we are all human and make mistakes. Coaches are no different than anyone else in this regard. For example your coach may suggest an idea that’s not a good fit for you, or share a feeling or intuition that may not be right on target for you at the moment. This doesn’t mean that the “coaching” isn’t being effective, in that we can learn as much from what we don’t want as from what we do want.
Your coach is not superior to you.
Coaches are experts in utilizing a process and some tools that can help you in accelerating your learning and taking effective action. You and your coach are equal contributors in this “co-intuitive” relationship. The focus is on the relationship and the process, and how they can help you get what you desire. You and the coach are equally important in this process.
A coach may not always appear “socially correct.”
A coach may interrupt your conversation or do other things that may not seem socially polite. For example this can occur if you have already made a point and are running on about a situation, or possibly when an insight or intuition needs to be shared in the moment. Unlike simply meeting with a friend for coffee and friendly conversation, a coach is focused less on social niceties and more on what is going to allow you to move forward. The coach is not there for your approval, but for your betterment.
The coach may use tools from areas other than coaching.
Coaches sometimes remove the coaching hat and put on a training hat (sharing a skill) or a consulting hat (formulating strategies), when these things might help you to move ahead more efficiently.
The gremlin factor will usually come into play.
Coaching is usually a relationship that may last anywhere from three or four months to a year or two, sometimes longer. Most major changes in our lives take some time to fully actualize. Usually within the first few months, after the “honeymoon” phase of being excited about new directions in their lives, some clients will start to question, and sometimes self sabotage their plans and the process. It is helpful to be aware of this “gremlin factor” and it usually is in the client’s best interest to stay the course, work through it and to continue their journey successfully.
Please contact
us if you would like to find out more about
how personal coaching could help you.
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