life coaching - Inner Firewalking

What is Coaching?

The following is an excerpt from the CoachStart Manual.

Coaching is essentially a conversation between a coach and his or her client, starting with the aim of helping the client to live a fulfilling life. This is most often achieved by helping the client:

(a) Set goals that will add significantly to your client’s life (or as I like to say, and ‘put a BIG smile on your face’).

(b) To achieve those goals.

In this way, coaching can be broken down into two halves and this is a great way to communicate coaching to prospective clients.

You may also help the client live a more fulfilling life by helping them to increase their level of self-awareness. This alone can help someone move forward in any area.

Of course, sometimes the client may want to achieve a specific goal that the coach may not agree with (that achieving that goal will not add significantly to that person’s life). In such a situation, the coach may point this out — either immediately, or over time — and will still be willing to work on achieving the goal.

Laura Berman Fortgang’s Model of Coaching

The following is an excerpt from Top Coaching Techniques.

David: Okay. So, I know a really nice model of coaching – I heard this from Laura Berman Fortgang at the ICF conference, and I really like it. Her model that she is using is very simple, and that is to begin each question with the word ‘what’.

So don’t ask them ‘why’. Never ask clients, ‘Why do you want to do that?’ or ‘Why do you feel like that?’ Just ask them ‘what’. You can ask them ‘how’, but again, try to start with what. It was really funny when we did the exercise, we had someone tell us about a problem, and we had to say ‘what’. Like, ‘Okay, what’s the solution?’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I probably need to lose some weight.’ Then I’d say something like, ‘What’s the first step?’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, I probably should go to go to the gym.’ and I’d say, ‘What are you going to do at the gym?’ It was really amazing how it just focused them in, even if they didn’t know the answer. In five ‘what’ questions, they had it.

Coaching Tips and Hints

The following is an excerpt from Top Coaching Techniques.

Learn to trust your intuition

If someone is stuck figuring out what they love, ask them “what do you hate?”

Remember your mission as a coach: to discover or create who your clients really are.

Make a list of 10 to 15 powerful fallback questions to help if you ever get stuck in a session. Here’s a couple to get you started:

How could I best help you with that?
If you were the coach right now, what coaching would you give yourself on this?
What’s something that you could do to move forward on this goal?

Convert more prospects by helping them to clearly see the gap between where they are and what they want. Then get them excited about achieving what they want.

Exceed the expectations of your clients. Give them more value than they pay you in money.

Stay educated. Never stop learning about your specialized field. Become an expert.

To help draw out a client ask them about different areas of their life. Go through the standard areas (relationships, finances, health, and career) and ask them to score each one out of ten. This will help you find out where to start with the client.
Dealing with resistance: Start with building awareness of the resistance. Set targets you can actually achieve. Try double padding. You set the target for each day; estimate how long each will take and double the time. Another thing is to set spaces in your day, like an hour space in the afternoon.

Future vs Past

The following is an excerpt from the CoachStart Manual.

People love their stories! They love their past, reasons, and complexities, perhaps because they validate who they think they are.

As a coach, I’m not interested in 90% of the past. I don’t want to know why you spent 5 years in an unhappy marriage or the list of complaints you have about your boss. I’m more interested in what you want, and – what you’re going to do about it. It’s a conversation about the future, rather than the past. Many people can describe exactly what they do not like about their lives. However, when asked how they would like the situation to look, more energy is required. Our job is to have them look in that direction.

The Coaching Market

The following is an excerpt from the CoachStart Manual.

Ten years ago, no one had heard of life, business, or corporate coaching. Today, it is featured in The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, Oprah, and CNN. And still, most of the world’s population has not heard of it. Demand for coaching is expected to continue to grow and may accelerate. What will happen when the first major movie featuring a life coach hits the street? Corporations are jumping on the band wagon: they want to hire corporate coaches, but even greater is their desire to have their managers trained in coaching techniques, and to develop a “coaching culture” within their organization.

There are an estimated 10,000 part-time and full-time coaches worldwide (ref: ICF). The number of people entering the emerging field of personal and business coaching has doubled in size each of the past three years (ref: CoachVille™). Several hundred articles, TV and radio shows have been done in the past three years. Coaching has been written about in Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune, Money, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, New Age Journal, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Bloomberg Personal, Newsday, etc.

The number of corporations using coaching is increasing. Fortune magazine has referred to coaching as: “one of the hottest things in human resources” and “a grassroots movement that is spreading in some of the unlikeliest corners of corporate America, including IBM, AT&T, and Kodak.”

Coaching is strongest in the US, followed by the UK, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand. Coaching is reaching more and more countries all the time; my newsletter subscribers now come from more than 90 countries.

Improvements in technology including teleconferences, cheap international phone calls, and the reach of the internet are making it even easier for coaches to build a successful practice with low overhead.

Ginger Cockerham on Dealing With Challenging Coaching Situations

The following is taken from David’s interview with Ginger Cockerham in 10 Super Coaches.

What if a client brings up a serious life problem – and I don’t have a clue about how to help her/him?

I learned to distinguish between coaching and therapy and referred clients quickly who needed therapy. With the rest of my clients, I recognized that it was not my job to solve my client’s problems – it was my job to be their coach and support and encourage them as they discovered their own solutions.

How can I possibly convince a company that coaching will impact the culture and the bottom line with no established research to substantiate that?

I did pilot programs that would provide results substantiated by their internal records.