What is Coaching
Coaching is about relationships, about conversations, working with a professional coach focuses your attention on what you want to achieve. Coaches work with you to clarify your purpose, define the road- you want to travel. The international Coaching Federation (ICF), defines coaching as ‘partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential’. Coaching occurs through purposeful conversations focussed on personal, career, professional, leadership, management, organisational challenges or future opportunities. The purpose of coaching is to facilitate sustainable change, build confidence, unlock potential, gain fresh perspectives, clarify purpose, enhance interpersonal effectiveness, decision-making and strategic thinking. Coaching clients are creative, resourceful, capable of achieving what they set out to achieve. Coaching is about the client.
Coaching is not mentoring, or supervision or counselling.
Benefits of Coaching
There are many benefits of hiring a professional coach.
The International Coach federation (ICF) identifies the following benefits: gaining a fresh perspective on personal, professional, or organisational challenges and opportunities, improving relationships, improving personal leadership effectiveness and productivity, increasing employee engagement, increasing self-confidence, and increasing satisfaction with life or work. Coaching benefits individuals, organisations and the clients of service providers.
Research by ICF has shown that clients of professional coaches are generally satisfied with Coaching. A professional coach being a person who has completed the education and training required to be Credentialed by a professional coaching organisation, such as ICF, and abides by their code of ethics.
Coaching can encourage:
- Client self-discovery
- Client generated options, solutions, strategies
- Responsibility, Accountability, Productivity
Do I need coaching
No one really ‘needs’ coaching. Yet anyone willing to engage with a Coach can benefit from the process. How often in this busy world do you have an opportunity to have someone truly listen to you, with curiosity, with acceptance. Coaching starts from the position that people seeking coaching want to be more effective in their personal, professional and/or work environment.
An individual might seek coaching to begin a journey of change, to gain a greater sense of purpose or fulfillment, to live more consistently with their personal values.
Organisations engage coaches to work with successful professionals, managers and executives to enhance their interpersonal effectiveness, leadership or change management skills. Focussed coaching conversations conducted with individuals, groups or teams, facilitate the desired changes. A Coach does not provide answers or give direction they facilitate discovery, clarity, problem solving, by asking powerful, insightful questions and challenging assumptions.
Where a coachee is experiencing personal problems, distress, which impacts on their personal or professional life short term counselling or hypnotherapy may assist.
