Change Coaching

The role of the coach engaged in change coaching is not new, only the use of the word coach is.  The function of the confidante and peer, mentor and friend, advisor and chief of staff (and so much more) has been around since humans stood up and became electricians.  We do need other people, although, in the strictest sense, the roles played by breakthrough life coaches are not truly necessary to your life’s success.  But coaching can be practically necessary, because it can be the difference between success and not starting.

Our Credo Briefly

∞ "What a piece of work is man!"  You already have in you much of the power and knowledge that you need to change.
 

∞ Jumping Out of Ruts is Hard Work Without a Partner.  Our life's work is to leverage the power within you so that your fleeting impulses to change are kept alive long enough for change to actually occur.  You've had such impulses before, right?  This time, let's lock them in.

∞ The Best of East and West.  Our coaching, and particularly our work in goal-setting and goal-achievement -- which is nothing less than the creation of your future self -- draws from the most advanced brain science, quantum physics, and neuro-psychology, as well as from the teachings of wisdom traditions such as Taoism, Buddhism, and others that beat the scientists to the punch by thousands of years.

∞ Transparent Business Practices.  You deserve to know the background and qualifications of a potential coach before you spend time arranging to meet him or her.  Unlike some services on the Internet, we'll actually show you our coaches before your free consult.  (Really -- what are they hiding?)  And we'll tell you our prices up front, without cagily insisting that you submit to a free consultation first!

Coaching from the Inside Out

We coach in many ways and from many places within both you and ourselves.  One of the most common ways is this:  from the inside out.  There is no external goal that should not first start with our signature theme:  to help clients identify the masks and markers of the false self, so that they may begin to uncover their real self, the authentic self, and grow into the lives, careers, relationships, and businesses they were meant to have.

Feroce Coaching works because our coaching fulfills several human fundamentals:

1.  The longing for an ally or partner on one's path, particularly during challenging times.

2.  The longing to be and feel understood.

3.  The curious but true need for permission to change, particularly in cases where doing so will mean a loss of understanding from, or even growing away from, old friends.

4.  The power of commitment and accountability, wherein a person wanting something strives harder for it because of a promise to another (even to a coach).

To see what your Feroce coaching could look like in hindsight a few months from now, take a look at some of our recent success stories or the turning points clients reached in recent breakthrough coaching conversations.  Or save your eyes and just write us, and let's talk it out like the colleagues we could become.

At Feroce Coaching (see About Feroce), we really do believe that all breakthrough coaching is about revealing to you that much of the wisdom and happiness you seek are already within you, beyond all longing.  Our job is to use our experience, proven techniques, and even intuition to draw out the real you -- as person, manager, career-seeker, leader, or half of any relationship.  Any good life coach, business or executive coach, or career coach should operate from the same premise, stated or not. And then do what coaching does best, and advise and direct you until you've got a hold of your vision, once and for all.

You Don’t Really Need a Coach

A Coach Can Be the Difference Between Success and Not Starting at All
Feroce Coaching Acknowledges How Infinite in Faculty Are Human Beings
Coaching is Person-Centered and Great Coaches are Experts Primarily in the Those Polar Opposites, Intuition and Process


You Don’t Really Need a Coach

If you think the apparent promises of coaching – reach virtually whatever goals you wish, in less time – are so much pie in the sky, it is because you undoubtedly imagine, in error, that a coach will bring these things to you.  But reaching previously unimaginable goals is possible precisely because it is the individual’s will that is endlessly resourceful, and because the power of his or her spirit, usually left to slumber, is great indeed upon awakening. 

In the strict sense that it is not the coach, but you, who reaches the goals set in a coaching relationship, you don’t technically need a coach.  But if you've ever gone jogging, by yourself and with another, then you probably know that you can do better with someone pushing you.  And if you have any doubt about how effective we've come to be, write us, or look at our testimonials!

A Coach Can Be the Difference Between Success and Not Starting at All

At the same time, as the Teton Sioux Lone Man (Isna-la-wica) put it, “I have seen that in any great undertaking it is not enough for a man to depend simply upon himself.” Lone Man, we don’t mind conceding, probably wasn’t thinking of a coach.  But while the role of the coach-as-change-agent, in any of its guises, may not be necessary, that role is so often the critical difference between a person attaining goals – or failing, or not even setting any up at all, or not trying in the first place.  It may not be too much to say that for most people at most times of their lives, the role played by someone like a coach (if not a coach per se), is practically necessary for the attainment of many goals.

Feroce Coaching Acknowledges How Infinite in Faculty Are Human Beings

So, when we talk about ferocious and personal change coaching we talk about helping a client reveal his or her true self with a knife blade through the busyness, the distraction, the often unconscious attachments to the beliefs that limit and circumscribe us. Coaching, like Kafka’s role for literature, can be an “axe for the frozen sea within us.”

We are not original in believing that you are ultimately the greatest source of expertise on not just your self, but also your aspirations, talents, aptitudes, shortcomings, and gifts.  The great prophets began saying it millennia ago, and the poets and mythmakers too. “The Kingdom of God is within you,” as a certain Jewish carpenter said many years ago.  Our greatest secular saints have chimed in, saying, as Shakespeare did, “What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!"

In a quote often mis-attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, W. H. Murray wrote, in The Scottish Himalaya Expedition, in 1951:

the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.  I learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!

Among the Native Americans and in the United States alone, our most esteemed thinkers have been of like mind.

• "There is but one cause of human failure,” wrote William James. “And that is man's lack of faith in his true Self."

• “I am larger, better than I thought,” added Mr. Whitman, “I did not know I held so much goodness.”

• "The only real valuable thing is intuition,” said Albert Einstein. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

• "You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose." Dr. Seuss

As Joseph Campbell taught us all before his passing, there is much we traded, much we lost, in exchange for the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.  Machines and reason were well-qualified, or so it seemed, to shoulder the inefficient work that had always been done by communal traditions and ancient wisdoms, by intuition and meditation and the mysterious power of listening to the self.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, the center of the 19th-century American Transcendentalists, observed, in an unintentional pun, "The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet."

Coaching is Person-Centered and Coaches are Experts Primarily in Those Polar Opposites, Intuition and Process

If you think coaching, whether business or personal coaching, is primarily about imparting the sorts of “skills” that you hear about in business school (running meetings, organization, time management) or in self-improvement seminars (empathetic listening, withholding judgment), then there is a good deal more you may want to learn about coaching.  If business skills alone, such as they are, were enough for happy and successful lives, there would not be so many people feeling so much emptiness, so many people in search of meaning, or so many people looking to coaches, consultants, therapists, and others for help in setting a goal and a direction.

Moreover, because the essential skill of coaching is the process, it matters very little whether a coach is a subject matter expert in, say, sales, in order to be a sales coach, or even in leadership in order to be a leadership coach.  Life or business coaching is not at all like sports coaching in this respect.  That’s because the primary function of the life or business coach, whether in a sales or leadership coaching capacity, remains the same:  all while tapping the client’s own knowledge and resources, we facilitate bringing out the client’s goals, mapping out alternative ways of achieving them, setting courses of action, and rigorously following up. 

If the coach had experience in sales and leadership that expertise could, possibly, help, but not nearly as much as most people imagine.  Better to find a coach whose methods, commitment, acuity, and even personal charisma are up to the task.

You – not any coach, therapist, counselor, or consultant – are the expert on you, your true self and false, your goals and dreams, and your aptitudes.  A coach is a partner, a trustworthy confidant and an expert primarily in the process of helping you to uncover what you already know about who you really are and what you want to be and do in your life – and to help you attain the discipline and commitment to become and do it.

We bring to the task the following guiding principles:

• A posture of non-judgmental awareness, or unconditional positive regard, or, more simply, acceptance of you
• Authenticity, and honesty coupled with sensitivity
• Compassion-in-action, and empathy

Contact us about change coaching now.
 

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About Feroce

Meet the Head Coach