ABOUT COACHING
“During the 1960’s the business world started to look at sports coaching and adapt the techniques for use in training and development. These techniques have been developed and enhanced, and today coaching is one of the fastest–growing personal development strategies used by chief executive officers (CEOs), entrepreneurs, professionals, people in the midst of career change and others struggling with life issues.”
– Anthony M. Grant & Jane Greene
COACHING
Coaching is an ongoing professional relationship that helps people produce extraordinary results in their lives, careers, businesses, or organizations. Through the process of coaching, you will deepen your learning, improve your performance, and enhance your quality of life.
In each meeting, you choose the focus of conversation, while I listen and contribute observations and questions. This interaction creates clarity and helps to move you into action. Coaching accelerates your progress by providing greater focus and awareness of choice. Coaching concentrates on where you are now and what you are willing to do to get where you want to be in the future.
Professional accreditation is governed by the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the world’s largest organization of professionally trained coaches, and the leading voice for the global coaching community.
ICF credentialed coaches recognize that results are a matter of your intentions, choices, and actions, supported by the Coach’s efforts and application of the coaching process.
Coaching, drawing on the approaches of several fields, is considered different from the following:
- Therapy
- Consulting
- Mentoring
- Training
- Athletic development
- Managing
Coaching uses the power of relationship, process, and conversation to facilitate positive change that leads to desired results.
Coaching is a Relationship based on
- Trust and mutual respect
- Confidentiality
- Contract or agreement to coach and be coached
- A balance of support and challenge
Coaching is a Process that involves
- A focus on building from strengths
- An appreciation of what is already working
- Focused inquiry
- An action–reflection learning cycle
Coaching is a Conversation that uses
- Listening
- Questioning
- Offering observations, perspectives, pathways
- Structuring to support learning and action
Key points about you in the coaching relationship
- Professional coaching is focused on your agenda. You set your own goals, examine your own feelings, evaluate options according to your values, and make your own decisions.
- For the most part you have the answers and the wisdom; I act as a facilitator to help you discover your own answers, help you find the courage and confidence to implement your answers, and support you through the change process.
- Coaching requires permission from you. Coaching is not something done to someone; it is something done with someone.
- Your overall wellbeing is a fundamental consideration in coaching.
- I adopt a holistic perspective about you, even when the overt goal of the coaching contract is narrowly defined.
- “Whole person” includes your emotions. I work with the emotions that come up in the coaching process.
- “Whole person” also includes the non–rational and non–logical. There is space for playing with your imagination in coaching. You are unique, and my responsibility is to work with you to design the process that will best suit you. This requires my flexibility and creativity.