What is Coaching?
– Sir John Whitmore, Coaching for performance
What is Coaching?
Coaching has been defined in many ways over the years and it will differ slightly, depending on what field we are looking at.
Originally it was associated with sports. Every athlete had a coach to help them improve their performance. Today you can find coaches in many, different aspects of a person’s personal or professional life, from business, through finances, performance, relationships, to personal growth and development.
The essence of coaching is helping a person to create changes in the way they want to change and facilitate them to go in the direction they want to go, by removing their inner obstacles. Coaching builds awareness, empowers choices and leads to change.
As discussed in the NLP and Hypnotherapy sections, everyone is unique. We all gather information about the world and make sense of that information in ways that are unique to us. Therefore, the way we learn is going to be different too.
How does coaching work?
Coaching is about creating a learning environment where you feel safe and free to explore your very own, unique representation of the world. A coach acts as a guide in your world and helps you to get to know yourself better.
A coach will help you to find the way how you can best learn, and facilitate you to find your own ways, instead of telling you what you ‘should’ or ‘shouldn’t’ be doing. What a coach will do, is help you to explore options to move forward, develop a plan and success system and keep you accountable and focused on priorities and actions.
A coach may not have the answer to everything and may not be an expert in all subjects and fields of professions. And doesn’t have to be.
Coaching, just like NLP and Hypnotherapy, involves the belief that the individual has the answers to their own problems within them.
A coach has an ability to listen to understand, skills to ask the right questions and is equipped to lead you to your own, unique resources so you are able to utilise them to the fullest and find the solution to your own questions. Coaching gives you the tools to access your inner excellence and wisdom so you can solve the challenges you have in your personal or professional life.
Combining a number of coaching tools and techniques together with NLP, Hypnotherapy and Psychology creates an extremely powerful method that will help you break through any barriers you may have in front of you and achieve your set goals, moving towards creating a future you desire.
Interested and want to learn more?
Watch this short video to see how coaching works.
Frequently Asked Questions
Choosing the person, you enter a coaching partnership with, is a delicate question and always depends on two people; the coach and the coachee.
It is very important that you and your coach are well suited to work together. There needs to be a 100% trust, openness, and honesty between the two parties to make the partnership and coaching a success.
When you have your initial consultation with a coach (myself or others), you both will have a better idea whether you are well suited or not and make your plans from there. And if you don’t feel that the person you talked to was for you, that’s ok too! That doesn’t mean that coaching isn’t for you! You might just need to find someone else to engage with.
If you ever feel uncomfortable in a coaching relationship, remember, that it was built on trust, openness and honesty. Talk to your coach and see if there is a solution to the situation or whether the best decision is to break up the relationship and move on.
The most essential parts a coachee needs to have is an open mind, openness, honesty, determination and discipline. A pinch of curiosity, playfulness and some humour help the process too.
It is very important that the client, or as I like to call them: participant, takes ownership of their own development and understands that the coach is there to facilitate and guide only; the participant will have to do the work. Like everything else, success in coaching does require commitment, time, energy and focus. All participants will need to be willing to put in the work to achieve their goals.
So before you enter a coaching relationship, ask yourself the question:
‘Am I 100% committed to myself and to making a change?’
If the answer is YES, book in your FREE Initial Consultation and find out whether we are well-matched to work together.