Coaching involves partnering with clients, asking empowering questions and holding clients accountable. The coaching process helps individuals connect more with their inner purpose, through self-awareness, and apply that toward their goals. In a safe and confidential coaching environment, a client can explore his or her issues and concerns.
Why do you need a coach if you have your best friend or sibling or other family members to talk to? Family and friends are wonderful and valuable in many ways. However, with family and friends comes personal advice and input based on what they would like to see happen; or, they may hold back because they are too afraid to hurt your feelings. Coaches are objective and nonjudgmental. They do not have personal interests to meet in partnering with their clients.
Coaches do not simply tell their clients what to do, like consultants. Instead, coaches truly believe that their clients are the experts of their own lives and they have the answers within. The coach can suggest new ideas based on intuition and experience, but will continue to stay with the client throughout the process to implement a plan that coach and client come up with together. A coach helps a client follow through and do what he/she/they says he/she/they will do.
Finally, coaching is not therapy. Therapy is an amazing service and some clients simultaneously attend therapy while working with a coach. A therapist’s function is typically to fix problems and sometimes manage mental illness. Therapists dig deep in the past and the WHY. Coaches do not stay in the past, but rather, focus on solutions and the HOW. It’s all about the forward movement; championing clients to take their life from functional to optimal.
Whatever you might be going through, invest 30-minutes of your time for a complimentary call to learn more about coaching and how it might help you change the direction of your life.
-JH-