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What is Coaching?
Coaching is fundamentally about facilitating
change that will lead to desired results: facilitating movement
from a current state to a more desirable future state.
Professional coaching has been defined as an “ongoing partnership
that helps clients produce fulfilling results in their personal
and professional lives.”
Through the collaborative process of coaching, clients deepen their
learning about themselves and the opportunities and issues in their
lives, improve their performance, and enhance their quality of life.
This is a general definition, however, and it may mean slightly
different things to different people. The best way to understand
what coaching would mean for you is for you to experience it yourself.
Why do people hire a coach?
Just about anyone who perceives a gap between their reality and
their dreams is a potential coaching client.
Most people who seek the services of a professional coach want to
manage time better, improve their career performance, make better
business decisions, have higher-quality relationships, be more physically
fit and well, explore spiritual and personal fulfillment, set and
achieve more ambitious goals, and further their financial independence.
But these findings are generalizations from thousands of coaching
clients. There may be something else that you want. A professional
coach may be able to help you clarify what that is, generate options
for achieving it, and identify barriers to your moving toward it.
A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear,
who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be
who you have always known you could be. - Tom Landry
Coaching as a Tool: People
can reach their goals on their own, but coaching makes it happen
faster, and expands their options.
What would coaching do for me? A
survey of coaching clients identified outcomes of self- awareness,
setting better goals, achieving a more balanced life, lowering stress,
self-discovery, improved self-confidence, a higher quality of life,
better communication skills, and improved project completion. Because
coaching is tailored to your specific issues, your own list of outcomes
may include all of these and more. It is very likely to include
at least some.
What’s the ROI (return on investment)
from coaching? The same survey confirmed that 98.5% of coaching
clients found their return on coaching to be worth the investment
of time and resources; 70% of coaching clients rated it a very valuable.
Because coaching focuses on your own goals and context, determining
the return on your investment is a unique process. Your coach would
be able to work with you to create a measure of returns that would
satisfy the demands of your situation.
What is the Coaching Experience Like?
Coaching as Relationship: The coaching
relationship is a collaborative relationship between the coach and
the client in the service of the client’s goals. It is a partnership
that involves self-honest assessment, learning, support, challenge,
constructive action, and personal accountability.
Coaching as Process: Coaching is a
process designed to facilitate change. This includes change in the
client’s subjective experience of themselves, as well as changes
in the outside world in the form of objective results. The coaching
process supports change through learning, action, feedback, and
reflection.
Coaching as Conversation: Conversation
is the vehicle through which coaching takes place. A coaching conversation
is one is which the client gains clarity, explores possibilities,
sets goals, designs actions, evaluates feedback, and reflects. To
be an effective coach, one must achieve a high level of communication
skills. Some of the key skills for powerful coaching conversations
are listening, clarifying, asking powerful questions, reframing,
confronting, brainstorming, requesting, and acknowledging.
Issues worked on in coaching may be narrow
and specific, or broadly overarching.
The questions people bring to coaching are broadly clustered around:
- Fulfillment: Who am I? Why am I here? What is important to
me? How can I achieve balance in my life?
- Learning: Am I growing, mentally and spiritually? What information
and skills do I need to acquire in order to further my objectives?
- Performance: Am I maximizing my potential? What actions must
I take, &/or what behaviors must I change, to achieve my goals?
The decision to hire a coach can be triggered
by many factors, such as:
- Organizations use coaching much as they would training or consultants;
the difference is that studies have shown coaching to produce
more profound and long-lasting results than training or consultation;
organizations have also discovered the benefits of using coaching
after training or consultation, to dramatically enhance and sustain
change
- Time of transition (divorce, mid-life, retirement, widowed)
- Career dissatisfaction
- Failure to meet performance targets at work
- Relationship frustrations - with significant other, children,
or co-worker
- Lack of self-confidence
- Personal challenges, such as ADD
- The need to make a difficult decision
- Repeated failed attempts at a desired outcome
- Feeling out of control or unbalanced in life
- And other reasons, as many and varied as the coaching clients
themselves
- Feeling out of control or unbalanced in life
- And other reasons, as many and varied as the coaching clients
themselves
Now that you have learned about coaching, it is easy to get started
with your free initial session. Become a member today!
Become a member today! |
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