Who needs a professional coach?
We seem to be everywhere: parenting coaches, relationship coaches, career coaches, leadership coaches, money coaches, and the catch-all life coaches. Some of us help you get clear on what's next in your professional life or how to handle a promotion to a senior role; others help with changing how you think about something as a way to get unstuck from it. By and large, we are all in the business of helping you get from where you are now to where you wish or want to be.
How do know if coaching is right for me?
Given all this variety, it's useful to think about what you want coaching for, and what kind of coach will get you there. Coaching works better than most learning modalities because it is focused on you and your unique circumstances.
Why work with a professional coach?
Lots of people become coaches, building on careers in business or consulting, without specific coach training or certification. Unlike being a psychologist or therapist, there are as of yet no licensing prerequisites, and no requirement to join the ICF (International Coaching Federation), so just about anyone can hang a shingle and charge money to have a conversation with you about your goals.
I decided to go through the lengthy training and certification process to become a professional certified coach because I believe in an ethical and regulated coaching profession, and along with my fellow certified peers, we are committed to meeting strict credentialing criteria and adhering to a robust set of ethical standards, in service of our clients' needs.
You should expect no less.
Why work with me?
Most coaching helps you get clear on the issue at hand, then prompts you to make choices about what to do about it. My coaching takes an alternate route.
Whether you accomplish a goal or not is less of interest to me. Wait, what? you ask. Please let me explain.
What I do is help you become who you long to be. I do this by providing the kind of relationship you won't have with anyone else—one in which you engage in the most honest, put-it-all-on-the-table conversations with yourself, guided by my questions, challenges and candid feedback. The more you get clear on who you are and who you want to become, the simpler it is to make decisions about doing things that align with that.
Essentially, I don't think you can really DO you until you can fully BE you. And now that you are retiring, there is no better time to get really clear on who you are now that your identity is no longer defined by work.
When you work with me, the focus is exclusively on bringing into clear relief what matter most to you at this stage of your life, pressing through fear and uncertainty, so you can become grounded in a set of principles that govern your thinking and behaviour. From there, you choose how these principles show up in the life you are crafting.
A few things you should know about how I think and work:
- I believe the shape our lives often takes has more to do with avoiding things that scare us or make us uncomfortable, than with making choices that push us to learn, grow and find fulfillment. As your coach, I accompany you as you release the beliefs and stories that keep you stuck.
- I don't believe we all need a capital P purpose in life and can only find meaning from "living" that purpose. Sorry... I call BS on that. Rather, I believe we long for experiences in which we feel fully alive, and we are starved for moments of awe, connection and peace in this bewildering and distracting world. As your coach, I help you create cracks in your self-protective tendencies, so the light can get in and you can more fully experience your unique life in all its complexity.
A FEW MORE THINGS...
I went through my coach certification process after years working in senior organizational development roles, and helping teams become more effective.
It was in pairing up with my own coach, however, that I saw my limiting beliefs laid before me—specifically my fear of being who I actually was and not 'performing' a likeable version of myself—and from there, make life-changing shifts in both my personal and professional life.
Basically, once I experienced coaching, it was absolutely clear that no amount of reading, training, therapy, work-shopping or mentoring would ever have the profound impact on my thinking, feeling and behaviour as coaching did. I built a new framework for my life, changed behaviours that no longer served me and started operating from a strong desire to feel alive, doing the things I imagined I would "some day." Like buying a log cabin on a lake, starting to write a novel, and walking away from a job that left me bluer than a bottle of Windex.
I became a coach because coaching changed me. I know it will change you.