WHAT IS PROFESSIONAL COACHING? YOUR JOURNEY STARTS WITH SELF-OBSERVATION
The Coaching Process is about facilitating INTENTIONAL CHANGE through an ever evolving and dynamic partnership. Foundational to this partnership is honoring the client as the subject matter expert in his/her personal and professional life, believing that every client is Creative, Resourceful and Whole.
The process occurs through a series of guided conversations enabling the “coachee” to discover and implement new solutions to move towards the coachee's goals.
Discover, clarify and align with what the client wants to achieve
Encourage client self-discovery
Move from what’s implicit: beliefs, inner narratives, filters to explicit
Develop a set of practices that build and reinforce access to awareness
Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies toward the desired outcome
Hold the client responsible and accountable for their intended present and future
Good coaching questions give someone who’s busy and competent the space in which to step back and examine him or herself in the moment. The client can begin to observe and draw conclusions from her own actions from a fresh perspective and then choose the most generative response to meet the demands of the situation. This move from habit/default nature to presence-based awareness and problem solving is truly where the magic happens for clients, as new “connective tissue” supports more informed, mindful choices and sustainable physiological development.
What Personal and Professional Development Coaching IS and is NOT:
Professional Coaching is NOT Therapy.
Professional coaching focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes and managing personal and professional change.
Sometimes it’s helpful to understand coaching by distinguishing it from other personal or organizational support professions.
Therapy: Therapy deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or in relationships. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past that hamper an individual's emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with the present in more emotionally healthy ways.
Coaching, on the other hand, supports personal and professional growth based on self-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is future focused. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one's work or personal life. The emphases in a coaching relationship are on action, accountability, and follow through.
Consulting: Individuals or organizations retain consultants for their expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, the assumption is the consultant will diagnose problems and prescribe and, sometimes, implement solutions. With coaching, the assumption is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.
Mentoring: A mentor is an expert who provides wisdom and guidance based on his or her own experience. Mentoring may include advising, counseling and coaching. The coaching process does not include advising or counseling, and focuses instead on individuals or groups setting and reaching their own objectives.
Training: Training programs are based on objectives set out by the trainer or instructor. Though objectives are clarified in the coaching process, they are set by the individual or team being coached, with guidance provided by the coach. Training also assumes a linear learning path that coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear without a set curriculum.
COACHING IS...
Listening in a profound way
Asking questions that cause new, invigorating thinking and experimentation
A place where people can think out loud
Derive the greatest value and learning from your daily, real-time experiences
Acknowledging people for who they are and how they approach their work
Generating possibilities that result in desired outcomes
A way of allowing people to become attuned to their habit nature, triggers and cultivate internal resources to change/modify how they respond
A supportive, confidential partnership
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”
Viktor E. Frankl
Carrie Morris, PHR, ACC, CCSP Certified Professional Life Coach & Career Development Specialist
Dedicated to supporting clients’ recognition and achievement of their desired goals and inspired vision for the future.