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What is Coaching?

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The International Coaching 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.

 

Coaches honor the client as the expert in his or her life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful and whole. Standing on this foundation, the coach's responsibility is to:

  • Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve

  • Encourage client self-discovery

  • Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies

  • Hold the client responsible and accountable

 

This process helps you dramatically improve your outlook on life, while unlocking your potential.

You Can't Start the Next Chapter of Your Life

How does Coaching differ from Therapy, Consulting, Mentoring, Training and Athletic Development?

According to the ICF, professional coaching focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes and managing personal change. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand coaching by distinguishing it from other personal or organizational support professions.

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.

Wheat Field

What do we each have to do?

Each party has their own set of responsibilities, according to the ICF.

Coach

  • Provides objective assessment and observations that foster the individual's self-awareness and awareness of others

  • Listens closely to fully understand the individual's circumstances 

  • Acts as a sounding board in exploring possibilities and implementing thoughtful planning and decision making

  • Champions opportunities and potential, encouraging stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations

  • Fosters shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives 

  • Challenges blind spots to illuminate new possibilities and support the creation of alternative scenarios

  • Maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession's code of ethics.

Client

  • Creates the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful goals 

  • Uses assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others

  • Envisions personal success 

  • Assumes full responsibility for personal decisions and actions 

  • Utilizes the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives 

  • Takes courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations 

  • Engages big-picture thinking and problem-solving skills 

  • Takes the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by the coach and engages in effective forward actions.

12 Signs You're Working with a Personal Coach
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3 Big Oak Court  Durham, NC  27705
Cell: 510-599-5798
barbwrigley@gmail.com

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