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1. Focus. To create a safe, quiet, and
non-distracting environment for your intake session and
for all of your phone coaching sessions, please forward phone
calls from or turn off other phones, turn off your
pager, and refrain from using e-mail or engaging in any
other distractions for the duration of your session.
2. Self-Assertion. Your relationship with your
coach is a designed relationship. What that means is
that you will design how your coach will work with you
for the sake of achieving your goals. Prior to your
first paid session it will be helpful for you to be
thinking of what you want from your coach.
3. Background Materials. In the initial sessions
your coach will work with you to clarify your values and
work on your vision with you. If you have done any
homework on these matters, please send it to your coach
at the earliest opportunity.
4. Homework. Your coach will give you
assignments, homework, and inquiries. When an assignment
is given, it is given in the form of a request. A
request in coaching means that you can say yes, no, or
give your coach a counter-offer. You have a choice, so
please do not say yes to something that you really do
not want to do. Please complete in advance of the agreed
session any forms your coach and you agree you will
complete.
5. Perspective and Patience. In an ongoing
coaching relationship, you can anticipate highs and
corresponding lows. Clients typically lose enthusiasm
for a period of a few weeks between precisely 3 and 6
weeks into the coaching relationship. You can expect
that low point to happen when you hit your first
obstacle. You as a client are the one who grants the
coaching relationship power. Your success in getting
where you want to go will be proportional to how much
power you grant the coaching relationship. Use your
coach to help you break through the obstacles that are
in the way of your goals and dreams.
6. Managing Expectations. You should try not to
enter coaching with a short-term mindset in which you
expect results to be immediately visible. Frankly,
sometimes they are.
Coaching
breakthroughs happen in the first call. But
sometimes a few calls go by as you and your coach look
for the locks and the keys, ruminate, experiment and
float trial balloons, dive down rabbit holes, and so on
– like the collaborative personal effort that coaching
is – only to result in a major a-ha moment in the next
call. Progress is also not always readily
identifiable at any particular moment, such as after
session 5, but rather with the hindsight of, say,
session 9.
Tectonic shifts are not
always of earthquake size; sometimes they are
imperceptible. But the earth moves nevertheless. And
sometimes you don’t see progress where it’s happening
because you are looking some place else – usually where
your expectations and pre-formed notions have got you
looking. Be aware of the tendency to expect your real
life to emerge from Door A, and to grow frustrated, when
some truth important to you may in fact, and usually
does, emerge from Door Q.
7. Accountability to the Coaching Relationship and
Myself. I understand that coaching is a partnership,
and that each session, like my overall success, depends
on my preparation and commitment, as well as the mutual
respect my coach and I demonstrate to each other and
each other’s time. If I am late to any of the coaching
calls, I may, at my coach’s discretion, be charged for
the full session and coached for the time that is left
of that session. If I miss or otherwise cancel a
coaching session and my coach is unable to reschedule
another session during the week of the missed session,
the missed session may also be charged to me, at my
coach’s discretion.
8. Telephone Calls. I understand that when
telephone calls are to be made, I will, as a measure of
my accountability to the coaching engagement, make the
calls at the number(s) my coach has provided. If my
coach has not heard from me by ten minutes after the appointed hour,
my coach may attempt to call me but is under no
obligation to do so. I understand that if bearing
the entire cost of the calls represents a financial
hardship to me, I may arrange with my coach to have the
coach return my call, at his or her expense, once I have
made it.
9. Consulting Work Outside Coaching Sessions. I
also acknowledge that my coach is not a consultant, and
that while my ability to send him or her emails and
instant messages is virtually unlimited, my coach’s
ability to read and respond to them all in depth is
governed by a reasonableness standard. I also understand
that absent a separate consulting agreement, my coach
will not be able, like a consultant, to perform
significant work or review of materials, at my
direction, outside of the coaching conversations.
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