What is Coaching?

People partner with coaches in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.---International Coach Federation

Professional coaches provide the structure and process that help their clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. They collaborate with people who want to improve their performance and enhance the quality of their lives. Coaches customize their approach to individual client needs. They are great listeners and observers. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client, since they believe that their client/partners are naturally creative and resourceful. The coach's job is to provide the support and encouragement that enhances the skills, resources, and creativity that their client already has within.

Why might you choose to be coached?

Here are some of the many situations that could cause you to initiate a coaching partnership:

• There is an area of your life that you need to improve, but you can’t seem to get started on it.
• You are at a crossroads in your life or at work, and an impartial third party can help you move ahead.
• You want to restore equilibrium to your work life balance.
• You have an exciting new challenge at work and need to adjust your skills or modify your style in order to meet the challenge.
•  You perceive that your organizational team is not working to its full potential.
• Interpersonal or organizational skill development needs to catch up to the technical skills in which you are an expert.
• You have a strong sense that you are not utilizing your full potential or inner resources in your current role or position.
• You want to explore the prospect of large changes in how you will spend your time.

To determine if you could benefit from coaching, start by summarizing what you want to accomplish. Once someone has a fairly clear idea of the desired outcome, a coaching partnership can be a useful tool for developing a strategy for how to achieve that outcome with greater ease.

Since coaching is a partnership, ask yourself if you enjoy and value collaborating with someone else, having an additional viewpoint, and being asked to consider new perspectives. Also, ask yourself if you are ready to devote the time and the energy to making real changes in your work or life. If the answer to these questions is yes, then coaching can be a powerful way for you to grow and develop.

Coaching is unlocking a person's potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them. - Sir John Whitmore

What are the benefits of coaching?

A coach will bring out the best in you and help you reach your goals more quickly than you otherwise would. He will help you to clarify the goals that are most personally relevant to you and, with that focus, provide the right tools for action and learning that will lead you to those desired outcomes. Your coach stays with you until those outcomes are achieved.

Your coach will work with you to identify where you are strong and what you value in life; and encourage you to emphasize these traits as the platform to launch your change journey.

This increased clarity leads to the ability to experience fresh perspectives in handling challenges and opportunities, to enhanced decision making and thinking skills, and to greater confidence and increased interpersonal effectiveness.

As the coaching relationship evolves, you can expect to see appreciable results in the areas of personal satisfaction with life and work, productivity, and the achievement of the desired outcomes. You are also learning sustainable life skills which will serve you beyond the issue which originally caused you to engage your coach.

Coaching has grown as a profession, I believe, because of the shortage of real listening in our society today and due to the lack of true connection that many people experience.....A coach is a partner who is hired to assist the client in going for greatness in any and all domains of their life.
People may not always need a coach, but I believe they do deserve a coach.
- Patrick Williams, EdD, MCC