INTRODUCTION
We all have goals we want to reach, challenges we’re striving to overcome, ideas that need a road map and times when we feel stuck. Partnering with a professional coach can unlock your potential and set you on a path to thriving personally and professionally.
What is coaching?
International Coach Federation (ICF) defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.
The coaching process can help you improve your outlook on work and life, while improving your leadership skills and unlocking your potential.
Professional coaching focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes and managing personal change. Other service professions, like consulting and psychotherapy, are based on the wisdom and expertise of the professional. In coaching you the client are the expert. Your coach’s role is to ask powerful questions, act as a sounding board, provide objective assessment and observations, listen fully and actively, challenge your blind spots, and foster shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives.
Why should you partner with a coach?
Why should you partner with a coach?
If you want to take advantage of an opportunity or challenge, feel “stuck” on the path to achieving your goals, or simply believe there’s something more to discover in your personal or professional life, partnering with a professional coach could benefit you.
Coaching clients who responded to the 2017 ICF Global Consumer Awareness Study reported positive coaching impacts including:
- Improved communication skills;
- Increased self-esteem/self-confidence;
- Increased productivity;
- Increased well-being;
- Optimized individual/team work performance Improved work/life balance;
- Improved business management strategies;
- Expanded professional career opportunities
Other common reasons for partnering with a coach include:
Expanding career opportunities;
Increasing self-esteem/self-confidence;
Maximizing potential; Defining strengths and weaknesses;
Improving business management strategies;
Managing work/life balance.
What’s your role?
The most successful coaching partnerships begin with a client who has a clear idea of what they want to accomplish and is open to collaboration and new perspectives.
As a coaching client, your role is to:
- Create the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful goals;
- Assume full responsibility for your own decisions and actions;
- Use the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives;
- Engage big-picture thinking and problem-solving skills;
- Take the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by your coach and engage in effective forward actions.