The decision to see a life coach to discover your power and opportunities is the first step in your journey.
A professional life coach, career coach, executive coach or transformational coach is a trained coach who partners with you their client to uncover, stretch and complete professional and personal goals. Together you will establish a coaching agreement, through coaching presence the co-created relationship will be based on trust and intimacy.
Two prominent Coaching bodies are the ICF and the EMCC. Coaches credentialed by them are trained to a certain level and bound by a code of ethics
https://coachingfederation.org/credentials-and-standards
Using active listening and powerful questions as well as direct communication your coach will partner you on your journey to discover your strengths, weaknesses and your true goals. Your coach will not tell you what to do. In partnership your coach will empower you to find you meaningfulness in the workplace or at home.
Using core skills and a tool kit including active listening, intuition, positive psychology and mindfulness to name just a few of the frameworks available you will explore your potential and achieve your life’s ambitions.
You will uncover your own answers and your own path. Your coach will create a safe but challenging environment providing you with the space to be empowered to move through, around or over the obstacles preventing you from becoming the best version of yourself you can be.
You will create your own clarity, your coach won’t tell you what to do, but through objective powerful questioning they will enable you to discover your own answers and your own goals.
You have all the answers yourself, a coach just partners with you helping you discover your own power, your own dreams and your own actions.
Coaching Discovery Session
The length of coaching session varies between 45 minutes and 2 hours and are determined by the coach you choose the obstacles you are overcoming and goals you are achieving. The length of each session and the number and frequency of sessions will be dependent on the discovery session and what is uncovered in this initial session. This can also be called a connection call.
In the discovery session your coach will ask you some questions…what you want to achieve in life, what obstacles you see in your way, when do you feel happy, which areas you’d like to improve, how does you future look. Your coach will then partner you, asking further questions getting you to dig deeper than your original answer and challenging you reflect on your answers.
Your coach will not force you to make decisions or lead you with questions, but they will challenge you and encourage you to reflect and question your perceptions to help you overcome obstacles on your path. A coaching environment is a private and safe space. If with your coach you both conclude your potential partnership is a “Hell yes!” then together in light of your goals you design a package of sessions that suit. It can be wise to have a cooling off period of a day or two before you commit to the package.
During a session
Coaching is a partnership between you and your coach, you are in control and you will encourage you using powerful questions and active listening to explore how you can make progressive changes in your life based on your aspirations. By challenging you perceptions and rewiring your mindset through self-reflection, obstacles will disappear, and actions and SMART goals can be set, leading to sustainable growth, creating a virtuous circle.
Your coach will also hold you to account and support you, partnering you to stay focused on your goals. They may also set you tasks and objectives that you will work on outside of your sessions.
The partnership with your coach in it’s raw form will illuminate dark corners that may be holding you back, help you to set goals and flourish. Your coach will help you to make positive changes and to GROW, whether in your career, growing your company, improving your confidence, creating a better work/life balance, your coach will open your mind to the possibilities that exist for you, and prepare you to take these opportunities and find your meaningfulness. In partnership with your coach you will flourish.
Your coach will determine what frameworks or coaching style will suit your partnership depending on what outcomes you are hoping to achieve. Your coach may have a unique framework or style that combines parts or levers from different schools of coaching, but the over-riding theme should be active listening and powerful questioning, whether the framework includes aspects of Mindfulness, High-performance, solution focused, positive psychology, holistic or transformational to name just a few.
Of course, your coach will naturally work with a style derived from their own experiences and training. Most of the time those experiences create a unique style that combines aspects from styles such as transformational, holistic, and solution focused.
Coaching Frameworks and Theories
Performance coaching
Progress, improvement and sustainable growth is at the heart of coaching – and enhanced performance is at the heart of performance coaching. High performance coaching will demand high commitment. A great framework coaches use is GROW, developed by Sir John Whitmore (https://www.performanceconsultants.com/grow-model)
Through questioning and listening performance coaching takes a more bespoke approach, helping you address your specific issues and challenges. By understanding all the factor affecting your performance coaching support the individual and maximise their performance.
Mindset coaching
Mindset coaching focuses on helping you uncover any blocks, patterns of thinking or limiting beliefs, behaviours that may be holding you back. Revealing them is the first stage to helping you rewire and change them. With your coach you will rewire and reprogramme removing blocks and replacing binding beliefs with a new mindset which will serve you better in achieving your goals. Most coaches will use frameworks that help to rewire mindsets even if they are not describing themselves as a mindset coach.
Transformational coaching
In some way all successful coaching is transformational, as you will be seeing a coach to undergo a change or changes in your life.
Transformational coaching is more of a focus on your self-perception or attitude rather than your actions pr behaviours. Goals and actions will focus on your self-perceived limitations or self-image rather than you actions or behaviours.
Not achieving or even trying to realise your dreams can lead to negative effects on people, resulting in feelings of disappointment and frustration leading to self-doubt and fear. Reclaiming your self-belief will lead to your confidence growing and make your goals and a feeling of satisfaction attainable.
Your coach can help you meet the call for courage and find the virtuous circle of deep and long-lasting transformation leading to a feeling of wellness and satisfaction.
Solution-focused coaching
Solution-focused coaching concentrates on what you want to ultimately want to achieve and looking at the solutions and building on your successes. Your coach will ask you about your goal so you can clarify your vision, questions will involve what do you really want? How do you envisage you will get there? When you arrive at your goal what next?
Solution-focused coaching encourages, self-examination, self-evaluation, well defined goal setting and a deeper knowledge and understanding of your path
This framework can be very useful for entrepreneurs wanting to find their drivers and seeking solutions.
Mindfulness coaching
Mindfulness coaching will help you develop calmer, more enlightened approaches to your life. ‘Mindfulness’ refers to a heightened state of awareness – of yourself and of the world surrounding you. It is about living in the now. Mindfulness can also be employed to improve your performance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwLYxMkh8V0
Mindfulness coaching theory can help you, create real presence, develop better relations and reduce tensions, improve your reaction to stressful situations, empathy with others, increase your concentration and your attention span.
Mindfulness is also used to treat conditions like stress and depression, and can be especially useful for clients suffering from stress and anxiety condition. Meditation is part of the mindfulness process.
Positive Psychology Coaching
Spearheaded by the work of Dr Martin Seligman at Penn State University, (https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu) positive psychology looks at what happens and how to build on things that go right. To paraphrase Seligman “positive psychology is about building and building on the best qualities in life.” Using several different frameworks -Learned helplessness, Character Strengths https://www.viacharacter.org, Optimism, Gratitude, Active Constructive Responding (ACR) Flow- the field is about helping people flourish. Positive psychology coaching science and research based can help enhance well-being, support happiness goals and improve resilience by utilising strengths and inner resources from within yourself.