About Coaching
Personal coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. This is particularly important in today’s uncertain and complex environment.
I honor the client as the expert in his or her life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful, and whole. (International Coach Federation)
A Two-Person Community
Working with a coach can be helpful for any person, but especially when that person is struggling with a problem, frustrated, or even nearing burnout. It provides a safe space to talk about life with an objective partner.
In that space, I partner with the client in a journey that empowers the client to function with greater self-awareness while effectively responding to their own unique life context.
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We each have within us giftedness that only emerges and becomes useful to us when it is discovered in community.
COACHING CAN
Stimulate Imaginative Thinking
Coaching questions can stimulate imaginative thinking that can lead to previously undiscovered options
COACHING HELPS
Narrow Down Options
Coaching also helps the client to narrow a range of options to those that best fit their own unique context.
COACHING BRINGS
Clarity & Focus
In the midst of a vast range of options, coaching questions bring clarity and focus to the client, cutting through the “muddle of life” that comes to all of us at one time or another.
COACHING IS
Safe & Supportive
The coaching partnership becomes a safe, supportive, two-person community that evokes the imagination of the one being coached, helping them move forward in life.
"...But this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus."
- Philippians 3:13b-14
Is Coaching for Everybody?
Coaching isn't for everybody. While many people make great strides in personal fulfillment and life enhancement through participating in coaching, some people don't do well in coaching. If you want someone to tell you what you need to do and are unwilling to do the personal work necessary to find your own unique answers to your own unique life circumstances, then coaching might not be for you.
What's the difference between coaching and therapy, mentoring, and consulting?
Coaching is focused specifically on the one being coached. The assumption of the coach is that the person being coached knows better than anyone else their own personal life circumstances. The coach simply helps the person being coached do the work necessary to find their own answers.
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The person being coached is their own expert and the coach joins the client on a journey of self-discovery.
Therapy
A counselor or therapist works primarily with people who are dealing with issues in their past or issues that demand a mental health professional. Coaching is not typically used for what are often called clinical populations and, when it is used in such a setting, it is only used by qualified mental health professionals.
Another way of looking at the difference between coaching and therapy is that therapy tends to look backwards while coaching looks forward. Depending on the issues and problems being coached about, persons may be encouraged to seek a qualified mental health professional.
Mentoring
Mentoring is advice given by persons who have traveled ahead on the journey and are advising those who are following behind them. In contrast, a coach walks alongside the person being coached and helps them discover their own answers, answers already within them as God's gift.
Consulting
A consultant is a person considered an expert who gives advice. A coach typically doesn't give advice. A coach helps to evoke answers from the person's own giftedness, skills, and talents, self-knowledge, and imagination.