What is Coaching
Benefits of Coaching
A Typical Session
What is Coaching
Coaching is a professional collaboration in which the coach supports you to set meaningful goals and to work at achieving them. Coaching concentrates on where you are now, where you want to be, what’s stopping you from getting there, and what you’re going to do about it. The coach’s role is to support you to:
- clarify what you want from your life;
- set relevant, inspiring, measurable goals;
- generate options and to create action plans;
- monitor and evaluate your progress;
- identify and overcome obstacles;
- stay focused and stick to your commitments; and
- celebrate your successes.
Coaching is not therapy or counseling. It does not aim to treat psychological problems or clinical issues such as depression or high levels of anxiety. Coaching does not deal with healing pain, dysfunction or conflict within an individual or between individuals. Rather, coaching focuses on supporting functional people to explore future possibilities and to gain inspired momentum towards their goals.
Benefits of Coaching
Coaching can help you as an intelligent, busy woman to stay on track. It gives you time out to focus totally on you and what you want.
Coaching can help you to clarify your goals and support you to achieve them faster than you might on your own. It can raise your awareness of the possibilities around you and help you to leverage off those possibilities to make things happen. It can give you the courage to actively pursue your goals, instead of just talking about how you’d like life to be if only things were different.
Coaching can provide a fresh perspective and the opportunity to try out new ways of thinking and behaving in a supportive environment. Coaching can also enhance your effectiveness, your confidence and your mindset as you focus on achieving goals meaningful to you.
A Typical Session
Throughout the coaching relationship, your coach will act as a facilitator of change, while encouraging you to take responsibility for enacting change.
Each session your coach will ask you what you would like to get out of that session and you will choose the focus of the conversation. You’ll explore what you’d like to have happening in your life and what’s happening now. The coach won’t, however, deconstruct your problems in an endeavour to figure out why things are the way they are so that you can fix them. Instead, your coach will focus on painting a picture of what could be and on drawing on your existing strengths and resources to identify strategies for moving forward. In each session, you will generate an action plan, which your coach will expect you to complete between sessions.
Your coach won’t typically provide you with answers or tell you what you should do. Rather, she will encourage you to come up with your own answers to move you closer to your goal. She will do this by asking relevant questions, listening, and contributing observations, concepts and principles. She may also encourage you to consider new ways of thinking or behaving. Although resulting conversations may be quite challenging, you aren’t expected to have all the answers. It’s much more important to come to coaching with a willingness to work at creating change and to be open and honest in coaching conversations.
