Frequently Asked Questions
Your Questions Answered
What is Coaching?
Coaching is a professional relationship that enhances your ability to learn, make changes, and achieve desired goals. Your coach helps you clarify what you want to accomplish, set specific goals, make an effective action plan, stay focused, and eliminate obstacles. In a coaching relationship, you and your coach plan, prioritize, analyze, troubleshoot, and brainstorm. Your coach provides structure, feedback, perspective, skill-building techniques, and thought-provoking questions. Together, you evaluate options, make choices, track your progress, learn from success and failure, and celebrate achievements.
Why coaching?
Coaching is essential to growth, development, and to achieve ones true potential. It helps us break free of the constraints that hold us back, both our own as well as those imposed by others. Today coaching is used as a standard practice in many organizations, especially with senior executives and leaders. Many leaders and managers rely on coaching to support them in their growth and development, and in working with them to increase their performance and productivity. We all wish we had more time, and coaching creates and opportunity to clarify and highlight what is most important, what is most fulfilling and satisfying, and to prioritize and align our lives to maximize our enjoyment and aliveness in life.
Whether it is professional or personal life, coaching has proven to make a profound difference in the lives of individuals and teams. It is a customized and personalized approach for figuring out what is most important in our lives, what we desire most, and then being powerful and courageous to go after it.
How do I know if coaching is right for me?
You may be wondering if coaching is right for you. Ask yourself these questions:
Are you seeking more clarity around your life purpose or career path direction?
Are you looking for more work/life balance?
Do you feel stuck in some aspect of your life and want to move forward?
Do you want less stress and anxiety?
Are you ready to make a positive change but don't know where to begin?
Do you want more satisfaction and fulfillment in your life?
Do you have a desire to contribute and make a difference in the world?
Do you desire more confidence and self-assurance?
Do you have passions, goals and dreams you want to pursue but find yourself stopped by self-doubt or fear?
If you answered yes to a number of these, then coaching is right for you.
How do I know if coaching is right for my organization?
You may be wondering if coaching is right for your organization. Ask yourself these questions:
Is your organization and its people seeking more clarity around the organizational purpose and mission?
Are you faced with doing more with less, and with maximizing the resources and staff that you have?
Is the organization and leaders struggling to motivate and engage the workforce?
Do your leaders struggle in managing and adapting to change?
Do you wish your people were more productive, engaged, and managed their priorities and time better?
Does the organization and its leaders need to make a positive change?
Do your people wish they were more confident?
Do your people want less stress and more work/life balance?
Do your people desire more confidence and self-assurance?
Are your leaders or people stopped by fear or self-doubt?
If you answered yes to any number of these, then coaching is right for you.
How is coaching different from consulting, teaching, and therapy?
Coaching is not consulting, although it is consultative. Traditional consulting offers answers and expertise. Coaching facilitates personal discovery by assisting you to find your own unique answers. Your coach provides his/her own expertise whenever it is useful, but never does things for you.
Coaching is not teaching, although it is educational. While teaching can fade, coaching reinforces learned concepts and skills until they become second nature. Your coach often provides skills training in the "need-to-know" moment that formal teaching misses.
Coaching is not therapy, although it is therapeutic. The focus of coaching is on taking a hard look at what a fulfilling life looks like, and then identifying specific plans, action steps, and ways of thinking that will move you toward achieving your desired goals. Coaching is focused both on who you want to be in life and then on taking action. It is not focused specifically on creating healing or fixing the client or their problems.
What is the structure for the coaching relationship?
The structure of coaching is flexible yet has several core components. You and your coach custom-design a coaching arrangement that meets your individual needs and schedule. The standard components consist of:
An initial foundational and discovery session. (1-3 hours)
Regular on-going coaching sessions (in person or by phone). These are usually in time blocks of 30, 40, or 60 minutes, which take place two to three times a month.
A completion session at the end of the coaching relationship. (1-2 hours)
How long does coaching last?
Coaching relationships generally last from a minimum of three months up to several years. The nature of your goals and the changes you wish to make will determine the length of time that makes the most sense for you.
What is the role of the coach?
The primary role of your coach is to listen, question, observe, pinpoint, re-frame, and articulate what they see going on. The plans you make and the actions you take are your own. A coaching relationship is one in which the coach and client are active collaborators: an alliance between two equals for the purpose of meeting the client's needs. The coach does not have the answers. You do. The role of the coach is to help you discover them.
Along with these answers your coach will help you discover your strengths and limitations, your values, what you want, what you fear, what motivates you, what holds you back, your purpose, your vision, and what you need to do to get there. Your job is to bring yourself fully to each session: your fears, hopes, desires, doubts, frustrations, successes, excitement, and passion: all of you. Your coach will do the same.
You will be responsible for taking action, making choices, and for the outcomes that result. Your coach will hold you accountable to learning from the doing or the not doing, the successes and the failures. Your coach will hold you for your greatness and true potential. By working together in this way, you both will open the door to learn more about who you are and to take steps in your life towards more choices, awareness, aliveness, success, and fulfillment!
How much does the coaching cost?
Depending on the length of the initial coaching package you choose, the price may vary. Contact us for pricing details. Once the initial coaching agreement completes, the coaching will continue month-to-month unless a new agreement is signed. Consider this a gift and an investment in yourself and your future. You are worth it and deserve it. Contact us today.