I’m going to say yes it does and yes it is as a coach aren’t I?! Here are some reasons why I think coaching works and things to think about if you’re considering investing & working with a coach.
What is coaching?
Coaching is all about moving you forward. It enables you to reach your potential by raising your self-awareness through powerful questions & conversations. It makes you accountable for taking action to achieving that potential. Coaching doesn’t drag up the past because you can’t change that, but you can change the future and where you are heading.
Isn’t coaching all a bit pink & fluffy?
I hear this quite a bit and usually it’s because you haven’t had a great coaching experience or found the right coach for you. There’s nothing wrong with pink & fluffy if that’s the coaching style that works for you. Coaching is not therapy, and it’s definitely not remedial. My coaching style is direct & it’s actions focused to move you forward to get to where you want to be.
Why should I have a coach?
Many successful business leaders and athletes have a coach: Mo Farah has a coach, not because he’s rubbish at running but because he wants to be the best he can be.
You know what the outcome needs to be or the result you want to get but need someone to help you think out loud and process these thoughts to get clarity. You’ll get clarity by working with someone who is completely impartial, unbiased and able to help you to see and think differently. You’ll get a challenger and a champion thrown in too.
I talk about being a Thinking Partner, my clients come to their own conclusions through my questions & observations of their thinking out loud about a situation, issue or challenge.
What kind of coach do I need?
It depends on what your goals are, there are life, business, transformational & executive coaches, to name but a few. I’m a personal development coach.
I believe that personal development is crucial to your success and there is no better investment than the one you make in yourself. Working on your own development will ultimately benefit your life and your chosen career path or your business.
You’d invest in yourself with a gym membership, or a new bag or clothes to make you feel good, so why not for your personal development? I appreciate it feels a bit indulgent but the feeling you get from it is more than worth it & lasts long term.
How do I find a coach that’s right for me?
There are lots of coaches out there & there is one for everyone. You can search the Life Coach Directory for qualified coaches, ask your network or contacts who they’d recommend. Perhaps you’ve been watching a coach on social media.
Have a chat with them, most of us offer free 30 / 60 mins consultations, find out about their coaching, find out about them. Then ask yourself; Did you feel a rapport between you? Did you feel like you could work with them? Did the conversation flow? Was it natural?
Should I only work with qualified coaches? How do I know if they are qualified?
That’s entirely up to you. Unfortunately coaching is an unregulated profession and anyone can call themselves a coach.
Generally speaking a qualified coach will have spent £000’s on their certification and will likely be a member of a professional coaching body such as the ICF – International Coach Federation, EMCC – European Mentoring Coaching Council or ACF – Association of Coaching. Some may be accredited which means they will have completed a certain amount of paid coaching hours to achieve the status.
That said, there are some amazing coaches out there who aren’t qualified. It will just depend on how important qualifications / accreditations are to you.
I’ve been coaching for 12 years in total and for 4 of those I have been a qualified, accredited coach & I’m a member of 2 of the coaching professional bodies.
It might not be important to you or my clients that I’m qualified & accredited, it is important to me – one of my values is integrity and doing the right thing even when no one is looking. I know that my clients are getting the best experience they can from me and I’m also bound by the ethics and values of the memberships.
What happens during coaching?
Each coach and each session is entirely unique. The coach provides a safe confidential space, with no judgement, where you can share your concerns, challenges & thinking and it’s a great way to pause, reflect, think and plan.
In sessions with me, I’ll always be driven by your agenda and what you want to achieve overall or what result you want from the session on that day. Every coach will have tools and techniques they use focused around powerful questions that get you thinking deeper.
It can be emotional, it can be challenging – if it wasn’t what would be the point? You leave with your own actions.
I don’t send you follow up emails with notes and actions because we’re all adults right? You know as well as I do that if you don’t do the actions – you are the only one who loses out?
What about accountability?
Again every coach will be different, but generally you’ll come back to sessions and reflect on what happened and what you’ve learnt. Knowing you are coming back to a session when you’ve committed to doing something tends to keep you focused.
Do they need to know about my role / job / business?
No, the best coaching often happens when the coach knows nothing about what you do because they can’t have an opinion or pass comment on how they’d do it (not that they should do that anyway – unless you’ve specifically asked them to).
Will they give me the answers or solutions?
If you are looking for someone to give you the answers or guide you in a direction – then coaching probably isn’t right for you. That said in real life, the coaching conversations I have do sometimes cross over into mentoring where a client asks me what I think or what would I do. If it’s appropriate I share a thought or even an experience, not to give an answer or to say you should do it like this, but maybe there is something in an experience I’ve had that might spark an action.
Final thoughts
You can work with the best, most expensive coach in the world, but you are only going to get the benefit from it if you are prepared to make a change and more importantly TAKE ACTION to make that change happen. If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always got.
I hope that’s answered a few questions for you? If you’ve got any others or you want to talk about how 1:1 coaching with me might work for you, book a curiosity chat HERE.
You can find out more about me and my coaching work HERE
