What is Coaching? Does it work?
Can it help you improve your life or is it all hype?
SELF AWARENESS. SELF CONFIDENCE. UNLIMITED POSSIBILITIES.
The LIFE YOU ARE MEANT TO LIVE.
Ask an ICF coach and you get one fairly consistent answer and fundamental approach. Ask an untrained/uncertified coach and you’ll get a million different answers (beware).
My take on it is that coaching is a collaborative partnership and a relationship that helps people make positive, necessary, and desired changes in their lives.
Certainly, this can be accomplished over a relatively short period of time. Through deep, powerful, and meaningful coaching conversations that spark new insights. And, that lead to new action, new learning, growth, and fulfillment.
In the sphere of personal development and growth, there are a variety of forms of coaching: life coaching, career coaching, business coaching, spiritual coaching, relationship coaching and so on. Within each form of coaching, there are also a variety of approaches.
I am a Personal Development Coach. Because, at the centre of every relationship, every life experience and every important aspect of life is you.
When we develop on a personal level, it affects all other external aspects of life.
I am an expert at personal development with over 20 years experience in people leadership. Additionally, I am an Erickson Trained and ICF Accredited Coach. I apply the Ericksonian Principles and abide by the ICF Code of Ethics in my practice.
The coaching I offer calls on Positive Psychology, Leadership Principles, Emotional Intelligence, Solution Focused Coaching, and several other resources across a broad dimension of fields. Even neuroscience and NLP. All, to develop better ways of helping people create lasting happiness, meaning and fulfillment in their lives.
What Coaching Really Is
At its core, coaching is about helping people discover who they really are. What they really want in life and how they can go about achieving it in the most authentic and personal way.
To be authentic is to be ‘yourself’– not anyone else’s version of who you should be – not even your own made-up version of the person you think you need to be.
These combined I refer to as: becoming your True Best Self and Living the Life You Are Meant to Live.
You will become ever more aware of your unique, natural strengths, your personal values, and ways of being in which you feel confident, at ease, enthusiastic, content, and gratified.
“Coaching expands your awareness of who you really are and what you deeply desire, need, and value so you can make more intentional and confident choices that bring you the most personal satisfaction and meaningful fulfillment.”
Over time coaching will help you experience major shifts in perspective or mindset – you may know these as ‘breakthroughs’ or ‘eureka moments’.
I call this: Mindshift.
Mindshift can remove or replace a way of thinking or being that was limiting your potential for happiness (limiting thoughts, beliefs and behavior patterns) and open up new possibilities for you IF it is followed with meaningful and consistent action and reflection.
“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” ~ Viktor Frankl
Mindshift has the potential to unlock and reveal new choices and possibilities you never considered before. Over time you will learn to make more effective decisions in your life (both big and small) by trusting yourself and taking the actions or steps that bring you closer to your desires and doing them in ways that bring the most fulfillment in the present.
This I call alignment.
Domains of Life We Can Focus On In Coaching
I believe in a holistic approach to coaching. Working with the whole person on a variety of areas of life that are important to you. With the ultimate goal of achieving and sustaining balance, harmony, continual progress, growth, and fulfillment.
Every domain of our lives affects each other. Additionally, finding fulfillment in one area can positively influence other areas and bring about or initiate change in a natural, easier way.
I believe that you are the expert in your life, and I am the expert in the process of helping you achieve whatever you desire. A coach doesn’t need to be an expert in your field of business to help you with your business – I don’t need to have the same experiences as you to be able to help you – that would be a mentor, a trainer, or a consultant. I also fulfill these roles for various businesses.
Instead of becoming dependent on someone outside yourself for answers, you grow more confident and certain that you have the answers you need inside you and that you can create new ways of achieving what you want.
People often come to coaching because they’re not satisfied with a particular area of their lives and wish to turn that around.
However, coaching isn’t about motivational pep talks or ‘positive thinking’.
It’s about going deep within and finding one’s unique source of power, the power of your authentic self, and then learning how to harness that energy to move towards living a richer and more fulfilling life.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” ~ Carl Jung
Why Coaching Works
At the core of coaching, is a strongly held belief that people can change, develop, and grow. They change when they:
a) believe they can,
b) are ready and want to feel better about something,
c) focus on working from intrinsic motivators,
d) take consistent action in alignment with what they want,
e) reflect and learn from their experiences,
f) acknowledge and celebrate their strengths and successes,
g) diminish the impact of negative thoughts & feelings; and,
h) continually make new choices in alignment with their desires, values, and priorities.
Coaching Builds Self Trust, Your Belief in Self
Coaching Increases Personal Accountability & Self Leadership Capabilities
Another piece of the coaching puzzle that helps in the process of change is accountability.
Coaching helps you increase and strengthen your level of personal accountability and self leadership, so you motivate and drive yourself towards your goals because you want to, and because they’re aligned with your vision and values.
Sometimes people find it easier to commit and be accountable to another person (e.g. a personal trainer) before they become fully self accountable and self driven.
With repeated forward movement and positive changes, you raise your level of personal accountability, self confidence, and self esteem.
Coaching is a Judgment-Free Zone
A Safe Place For Self Discovery & Exploration
Coaching wouldn’t work, and you wouldn’t be able to have such powerful and deep conversations if there wasn’t the essential component of trust between client and coach.
Coaching conversations are completely confidential and give you a safe place to share what’s on your mind and in your heart. Something most people rarely get to experience in their lives – someone who’s actively listening to them with full presence, patience, compassion, curiosity and without judgment and who only has their best interest at heart.
Most relationships don’t have those qualities and in itself just having someone fully accept you and support you the way you are, is a gift in itself.
Interested in Working With Greg? Learn More HERE
WHAT IS
SOLUTION-FOCUSED COACHING?
Coaching is a unique way to help people improve any aspect of their lives. The concept of coaching is often confused with forms of counseling, consulting, and therapy but coaching is actually very different. Coaching is future-focused. Coaching does not analyze the past but rather guides clients in their own goal setting. Coaches achieve this by asking the right kinds of questions and, most importantly, do not give advice, set goals, or take action on behalf of their clients.
The Erickson Coaching methodology I apply in my practice is solution-focused. The solution-focused coaching methodology is based on proven tools, techniques, and processes that help provide clients with the means to create truly transformational changes in their own lives. During coaching sessions, the coach and client embark on a creative partnership that aims to design and implement specific, meaningful, and measurable changes in the client’s personal and or professional life.
