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Coaching
fundamentally works for one reason: because the client wants
it to. So coaching is first and foremost
about the intent and will of the client. But there
are many tools and talents coaches use to
facilitate the client's desire for change.
Whether it comes in the form of a personal
life
coach or a personal
executive coach, coaching
is a profession built upon many others.
Techniques drawn from business strategy,
psychological development, and motivational theory
are just a few. But our
life
coaches and
business
coaches alike have a few tools that the professions from
which we've borrowed do not. Read on to find
out why.
In the broadest
sense, coaching works because a good personal life coach
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 when you know doing so
will mean a loss of understanding by, or even
growing away from, old friends.
4. The
tremendous power of commitment and
accountability, wherein a person wanting
something strives harder for it because of a
promise to another.
Personal Life Coaching Synthesizes Many
Professions and Techniques
The
Real Power of Coaching is in Its Commitment to
Your Expanded AWARENESS
Coaching
Works Because It’s Built on
Accountability
Coaches
are Emotionally Intelligent and Skilled with
People
The Financial
Side of Coaching: Why Coaching Makes
Economic Sense
Personal Life Coaching
Synthesizes Many Professions and
Techniques
Personal life coaching is
a synthesis of the most effective techniques of
its predecessors, which include:
• solid
business
coaching skills -- goal-setting, planning,
reverse-engineering strategy and tactics based
on the goal, analysis, follow-up,
accountability
•
mentoring
• the healing arts,
e.g.:
o the psychoanalyst’s
attitude of unconditional positive regard and
the meditator’s listening posture of
non-judgmental awareness
o
cognitive-behavioral therapy
o
Neuro-Linguistic Programming
(NLP)
o existential philosophy
and psychology
• organizational
development
• leadership
•
sports psychology
• motivational theory
•
entrepreneurship
•
marketing
•
philosophy
• personal development and
transformation
• spirituality
Wondering what to talk about with your coach?
Read Change
Coaching, or What to Talk About When You Talk
to Your Coach.
The
Real Power of Coaching is in Its Commitment to
Your Expanded AWARENESS
If, once
the client's intent is already strong, there is a
single reason for the effectiveness of
life coaching –
for it does appear to be more effective in
yielding measurable results than similar
person-centered fields such as psychotherapy –
that reason could well be the power of commitment.
In this case, commitment to the coach, and by
extension to yourself, to work with the coach to
expand your awareness. Of your self, your
self-limiting thinking, your career, your
relationships - your situation. Personal power
comes to you through greater awareness of where
you are stuck.
This power of
commitment is built on the social reinforcement of
people conforming to who they say they are, and
doing what they say they’re going to do. In other
words, personal coaching takes your own innate
honesty and good will and magnifies it for your
benefit.
Closely related to
commitment, in the success rate of Feroce
coaching, is this fact: coaching is
collaborative. It is two people (or more, in a
company) working in concert toward the same goal. What power can be harnessed in two or more wills
trained on the same object!
Coaching
Works Because It’s Built on
Accountability
Though therapy and
coaching can use similar skills at times, they
have very different means and goals – including
the setting of goals in the first place. I f you
hire a therapist, you are unlikely to set any
quantifiable goals (often with valid reason); at
the most specific, you may say you want something
such as self-understanding, or to feel better, or
to have more “balance” and quality in your
lifestyle. You don’t typically go to a therapist
when you are feeling well but seek personal
development or greater success. (See
The
Difference Between Coaching and Counseling).
Yet without goals, you
will not only lack any vision of where you are
going, you will have no yardsticks by which to
hold yourself accountable. And the undemanding
nature of the psychotherapeutic relationship
dictates that most therapists will not try to hold
you to any goals. Sociologists and business
experts who deal in goal theory know all of this
is a recipe for failure in meeting one’s goals. If
you're looking for a coach, failure isn't on your
agenda.
On the other hand, if you have
hired a personal trainer, the difference between
sitting at home watching the telly and sporting a
new waist, abs, or cardiovascular fitness is this:
you know that every day you are supposed to be at
the gym, there will be a trainer who has prepared
for your workout and gotten there before you. You
hire a personal life coach, or a trainer, because you suspect
you may not have the discipline or technique to
get there by yourself, but you do know you have
the integrity and sense of honor that will not
allow you to let others down – nor yourself, once
you have made a pledge “publicly” to that one
other person.
Coaching leverages that power
of commitment for results you simply can’t get any
other way – or, if you can get the results, you’re
likely to take several times as long (and vent far
more frustration).
Coaches
are Emotionally Intelligent and Skilled with
People
Beyond commitment,
coaches bring critical attitudes and traits:
emotional intelligence, ferocious listening
skills, proven psychological techniques, people
smarts, and, if you hire right, a sense of humor. Coaches perform assessments of skills and
aptitudes, of course, but they also draw out what
would give you fulfillment. Most importantly for
career coaching clients, at Feroce we dig into
what clients have always (often since childhood)
enjoyed, but too often overlooked. This is just
one of the ways we whittle away at who you might
reflexively think you are in order to expose the
real you.
We know how to help you model the
attributes of people you consider successful until
that modeling manifest as your new reality. We can
show you techniques of mental imagery and
construction of effective, positive affirmations.
We’re alert to linguistic patterns indicating
commitment – or the lack of it. We can spot speech
patterns that signal avoidance, resignation,
defeatism, and unexamined assumptions and
obstructions that impede success.
We also
work at converting clients’ unconscious negativity
and subtle patterns of defeatist thinking into
conscious empowerment. We do this using various
methods, including some drawn from consulting and
psychology. One is Neuro-linguistic Programming
(NLP), a series of techniques and procedures for
coding human behavior in order to assist clients
in understanding what they do and how they do it
when they do it excellently. Another is
cognitive-behavioral therapy. We use framing and
metaphors to set up worldviews in speaking to you,
and we employ reframing when we see that a
worldview (or set of assumptions) expressed by you
is restrictive and self-limiting.
We try to
apply the best of science and people skills to
real caring about how you fare.
Articles Related to Personal Life Coaching:
Personal
Development Coach
Personal
Development Coaching
Professional
Personal Coaching
Personal Coach
Personal Success
Coach: Success from the Inside Out
Personal
Success Coaches: Success from the Inside Out - 2
Personal
Success Coaching: Success from the Inside Out - 3
Contact us
about a personal life coach now.
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