COACHING WELCOME

 
 

+ What is Professional Coaching?

The Internal Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential, which is particularly important in today’s uncertain and complex environment. Coaches honor the client as the expert in his or her life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful and whole. Standing on this foundation, 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

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

+ What are some typical reasons someone might work with a coach?

An individual or team might choose to work with a coach for many reasons, including but not limited to the following:

  • Something urgent, compelling or exciting is at stake (a challenge, stretch goal or opportunity)
  • A gap exists in knowledge, skills, confidence or resources
  • A desire to accelerate results
  • A lack of clarity with choices to be made
  • Success has started to become problematic
  • Work and life are out of balance, creating unwanted consequences
  • Core strengths need to be identified, along with how best to leverage them

+ How is coaching distinct from other service professions?

Professional 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. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is future focused. 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 in a coaching relationship are on 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.

+ How do I best achieve my desired outcomes

To be successful, coaching asks certain things, all of which begin with intention.

  • Focus on yourself, the tough questions, the hard truths and your success
  • Observe the behaviors and communications of others
  • Listen to your intuition, assumptions, judgments, and to the way one sounds when one speaks
  • Challenge your existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and develop new ones that serve your goals in a superior way
  • Leverage your personal strengths and overcome limitations to develop a winning style
  • Take decisive actions, however uncomfortable and in spite of personal insecurities, to reach for the extraordinary
  • Show compassion for yourself while learning new behaviors and experiencing setbacks, and to show that compassion for others as they do the same
  • Commit to not take yourself so seriously, using humor to lighten and brighten any situation
  • Maintain composure in the face of disappointment and unmet expectations, avoiding emotional reactivity
  • Have the courage to reach for more than before while engaging in continual self-examination without fear

+ Within our partnership, what is my role as your coach? What is your role?

As your coach, I will:

  • Provide an objective assessment and observations that foster your or the team’s self-awareness and awareness of others
  • Listen closely to fully understand your or the team's circumstances
  • Act as a sounding board in exploring possibilities and implementing thoughtful planning and decision making
  • Champion opportunities and potential, encouraging stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations
  • Foster shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives
  • Challenge blind spots to illuminate new possibilities and support the creation of alternative scenarios
  • Maintain professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adhere to the coaching profession's code of ethics.

As the coachee, I ask that you:

  • Create the coaching agenda or topics for discussion based on personally meaningful coaching goals
  • Use assessment and observations to enhance your own self-awareness and awareness of others
  • Envision personal and/or organizational success
  • Assume full responsibility for your personal decisions and actions
  • Utilize the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives
  • Take courageous action in alignment with your personal goals and aspirations
  • Engage in big-picture thinking and problem-solving skills
  • Take the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by the coach and engage in effective forward actions