Why use a coach?

No-one knows your business, your life better than you. And no-one should try to tell you how to run it. But often the biggest barrier to us achieving our goals is ourselves: our self-doubts, our deep-seated fears, our lack of awareness and of self- and social management. To overcome these self-imposed restraints, an outsider who holds us accountable can help.

Someone who has our confidence and against whom we can test ideas, if only for a few hours a month. An experienced professional with a mind to understand us, our business and our aspirations. A skilled coach who is not only experienced in business development and change management but who knows our strengths and our blind spots and who is willing to challenge us constructively with honest feedback so to improve our decision-making and so lessen our anxieties.

My coaching process is designed to help you to improve how you perform your various life/work roles so to thrive. When one thinks ‘performance’, one often assumes ‘competition’. However, here performance refers only to you realizing the fullness of your natural potential.

Performance = Potential – Interference

And although we cannot remove all interferences that effect how we perform, coaching is a learned process designed to help you understand and to mitigate the effects of internal interferences, and thus to moderate the impact of external interferences that are present in your life/work environments so that you function at your level best.

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While much of the coaching process is cognitive by nature and so focuses on addressing rational obstacles, it also, where appropriate, addresses emotional content – unconscious dynamics. By reconciling what is referred to in folk terms as the ‘head and the gut’, the process brings greater clarity to decision-making and resilience to coping mechanisms.

Coaching is

first and foremost, a purposeful relationship dedicated to you and your needs. At the heart of the relationship is a confidential conversation between you and me. My part in the conversation is to listen, using practiced, full-sensory listening skills, so to understand your reality: your needs, your challenges (both internal and external) and to assess your existing resources.

From that point of shared understanding, and through the dynamic trusted connection that we will form, with your commitment and accountability, we will collaborate to co-create solutions to your needs. My coaching process is both output oriented, focusing your efforts on actionable, measurable goals, and insight oriented, so that your progress is sustainable.

Coaching format

As your coach, I will shape the coaching process based on an assessment of your needs. I will ask a lot of questions, and with your permission, I may take notes. To facilitate the process, I may occasionally introduce certain tools and techniques that I believe will support you.

While the primary focus of the process is on effecting the required change, a secondary goal is to equip you with the skills to self-coach going forward. Most coaching sessions will conclude with an action plan or other out-of-session work for you, as coachee, to complete before the next session and for which you will be accountable. Coaching sessions usually take 60 – 75 minutes, depending on the context. They may be at your location, or mine, as agreed.

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Other than for team engagements, our coaching sessions will be held one-to-one in private. The number and frequency of the sessions will be determined by your needs, your budget and your time horizon. Four to six sessions will often suffice where goals are readily definable. However, many of my executive and business coaching clients prefer to adopt an open-ended approach, whereby I act as a sounding board for their decision making and development. Session duration ranges from one hour to an hour-fifteen, depending on context. While business coaching may lend itself to skype or phone, for most other contexts face-to-face meetings are preferred, either at your offices or mine, as agreed.