Coaching FAQ's

What is coaching and what is a coach?

Coaching is a collaborative relationship between a coach, who has a developed arsenal of skills and tools, and a client, who is looking to change something important in their life.  

 

Just as athletes wouldn’t consider training without the expertise, perspective, and support of an athletic coach, many of today’s most successful individuals depend upon the skills of a coach to move their lives, careers, and businesses to the next level.

 

A good coach helps you break through your assumptions, interpretations, and limiting beliefs, and challenges you to enact change that will ultimately lead to a more fulfilling future.  Your coach will support you in grounding your actions and perspectives in the values that are important to you. And will help you to create strategies & action plans that lead you to accomplish more than you could do on your own.

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Why does coaching work?

Accountability 

Regularly scheduled calls or meetings prompt you to get more done than you would on your own. You’re able to take bigger actions, set bigger goals, and think bigger when you work with a professional coach.

 

Expertise

A trained coach brings proven skills and tools to their sessions, helping you achieve greater productivity with less effort. You’ll want to work with a coach trained in a program certified by the International Coach Federation (ICF).

 

Integration

A well-trained coach knows how to use the right questions and exercise to increase your INTERNAL motivation. The goal is not to simply be a nag or an added taskmaster in your life. Instead, a coach urges you to embrace new perspectives, skills and commitments in ways that make you eager to follow through on them yourself.  In fact, the work that you do between sessions is an essential part of successful coaching.

 

Speed

If you are willing to embrace the process and break free of your old ways of thinking, you’ll find that things start to happen very quickly once you hire a coach.

 

How does coaching differ from therapy, consulting or mentoring?

Therapy

Coaching is not therapy. Coaches don’t work on past-based issues or traumas except as background for your present life. Coaches are not psychologists or psychotherapists. If you start the process of coaching, and have not resolved a past issue, then you may be referred to work with a licensed therapist to resolve the issue.

Professional coaching focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes and managing personal change, starting from where the client is NOW.   While emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in your professional or personal life.

 

Consulting

When a consultant is hired, they bring their expertise to a given subject and they lay out a roadmap they believe will bring success. In short, a consultant’s focus is on the CHALLENGE.   With coaching, the assumption is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the Coach supplying supportive, discovery-based strategies and perspectives that will best serve the client’s goals. So, a coach’s focus is on the CLIENT, instead of on the subject matter.

 

Mentoring

A mentor is an expert who provides wisdom and guidance based on his or her own experience. Mentoring may include coaching, but it typically comes with strong personal opinions on what a client SHOULD do. With a good coach, you won’t be told what you should do. Instead, you might dig in to free yourself from some of those dreaded “should”s, and be free to envision a life you truly want to lead.  

 

How will I know if it's right for me?

The first step in benefitting from coaching is to pick the right coach.  And I'd be honored to spend time with you to see if we're a match.