WORK LIFE COACHING
Coaching is for deepening your self-understanding and taking action for manifesting what you want in life.
When you need to learn from the experience and insight of others, seek out a teacher or mentor.
But when it is right to learn from your own experiences, your own intuition, your innate sense of right and wrong, and even from the meaning of the sensations in your own body, then seek out a coach.
As a coach, I have helped people facing a variety of life’s challenges or tribulations.
Here is a sampling of topics clients bring to coaching sessions:
-
How to successfully start up a new business
-
How to decide the next step in one’s career
-
How to develop better relations with one’s colleagues
-
How to deal better with stress
-
How to minimize/ eliminate self-limiting beliefs
-
How to live a life with more meaning and fulfillment
-
How to increase confidence by amplifying the wisdom of your inner voice
To be coached is to have a partner in your own self-discovery on whatever journey you are embarking.
Here are some of the ways in which a coach will, or will not, be there for you:
-
Create a safe space for you to think introspectively
-
Listen intently with curiosity and observe how you are
-
Provide useful feedback for your consideration
-
Occasionally brainstorm ideas with you and blurt out ideas which come up
-
Challenge you to step out of your comfort zone and/or say things that are necessary and difficult
-
Assume that you are naturally creative, resourceful and capable of determining your own destiny
-
Maintain whatever you say in strict confidentially (unless legally or ethically compelled not to)
A coach will:
A coach will:
A coach will not:
A coach will not:
-
Dictate how you should think or act
-
Judge or evaluate you
-
Guarantee results (because results come from the actions YOU take after a coaching session)
To prepare for a coaching session, you should:
To prepare for a coaching session, you should:
-
Have a general theme/ topic of importance for discussion in mind
-
Participate from a quiet location where you can speak without being interrupted and feel comfortable moving around from time to time
You may wonder...
If coaching is all about self-discovery, why not just spend quiet time alone to think and reflect?
Indeed, that is a form of self-coaching.
Self-coaching may be sufficient.
After all, you can go to the gym and work without a trainer. But you might give up easily. Or you might overexert yourself. When you are alone, you can’t always keep up a good pace…or understand how to use all the machines effectively.
Working with a coach is similar.
While you still need to do all the heavy lifting yourself, the coach can hold the space for you and provide you a “coaching workout” that is right for you!
My coaching story starts with a dose of disdain and skepticism which gives way to appreciation and excitement.
I had called myself a consultant, a trainer and facilitator but I was reluctant to call myself a coach, especially a "life coach". I thought with disdain: what can a life coach know? I had met a few such people before and to be honest I wasn’t sure what their qualifications were. After all, I don’t suppose that a life coach had died once already and come back from the other side in order to impart some wisdom to us mere mortals.
However, I have a colleague who had encouraged me to take the Fundamentals of Coaching course offered by the Co-active Training Institute. Having taken the course himself a few years back, he thought it would be good for me. I was skeptical but I decided to sign up and suspend judgment. Done. In the schedule. Something else to add to the list of tasks to accomplish.
Upon taking the course, I had a shift in perspective and became hooked by the possibilities of being a coach. Not only had I come to recognize the value I could provide to clients as a coach, I recognized how the coaching approach could also make me a better consultant, trainer and facilitator.
After two years of study, I was awarded the Certified Professional Co-active Coach (CPCC).
I appreciate how coaching empowers me to serve my clients with agility without barriers or limit because coaching is in service to the “entire person”—not just the business manager, artist or athlete you are, not just the sibling, parent or friend you are--but every aspect of your being. No topic of conversation is “out of scope.” As long as the topic is important to you and you are willing to be open and introspective, then anything goes!
This is exciting!
About Bryan Sherman,
Certified Professional Co-active Coach (CPCC)
