What is Coaching and why is it so powerful?
The International Coaching Federation (ICF) is the leading global organisation dedicated to advancing the Coaching profession, setting high professional standards and building a network of credentiated Coaches. It describes Coaching as this:
Partnering with clients in a thought provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential, which is particularly important in today’s uncertain and complex environment. Coaches honour the client as the expert in his or her life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful and whole. Standing on this foundation, the coach’s responsibility is to:
- Discover, clarify and align with what the client wants to achieve
- Encourage client self discovery
- Elicit client generated solutions and strategies
- Hold the client responsible and accountable
This process helps clients dramatically improve their outlook on work and life, while improving their leadership skills and unlocking their potential”
I define it as “doing my very best to empower as many people as I can to become the creators of their own careers and enable them to find a job they’ll love!”.
Since I did my initial Career Counselling training back in 2003, I have also become a qualified Careers Advisor and an Accredited Coach specialising in Career Coaching. In that time I have witnessed the Coaching sector grow enormously. Now there are many Coaches out there really supporting and helping people to move forward and break through personal and professional barriers to create meaningful change in their lives.
However, if you’ve never experiened Coaching, it can be a bit difficult to really appreciate just how effective and powerful it really is. So, I have created this Coaching exercise for you to experience it for yourself.
It can be used to help you move forward with anything you choose. It doesn’t have to be work related at all. This way you can really experience the power of Coaching for yourselves.
Instructions
All you have to do is find some quiet time, away from distrations to ask yourself what would you like some help with? Take your time to answer the following 21 questions and write your answers down for each one. Spend some time reflecting on your answers and what the exercise brought to your attention.
You can even try it out on some of your friends!
Remember, it will be important to be open and honest with yourself – ‘you have to want change in order for it to happen’.
- Think of something you would like to move forward
- Give it a single sentence description
- What do you want to achieve?
- What long term result will you get and by when?
- What is the first step you need to take?
- How would you know when you got to the next key stepping stones?
- When you get to the desired end result, what would be the benefit to you?
- What is the most difficult part to deal with?
- What resources are you going to need?
- Where would you get these resources from?
- List all the things you could dream up to help move this forward to a whole or partial solution
- If someone else you know (with a different personality from you) was facing this issue, what would you tell them to do?
- How attractive are the above suggestions to you (on a scale of 1 – 10)?
- Rate out of 10 how much clearer you feel about the issue now?
- Where did clarity come from?
- Which option are you going to take?
- When will you start?
- When will you finish?
- What could get in the way?
- How could you overcome that?
- What support do you need?
So, how was it for you?
What did you identify and what did you learn about yourself? What actions did you identify and what are you going to do as a result of doing this exercise?
I’d love to hear how this exercise helped you!
Whilst, I don’t expect you to share the actual details, I’d love you to either contact me to tell be about your experiene or perhaps you could post something on my Facebook page to share the impact this Coaching exercise had on you.
If you think you could benefit from some Coaching with me please get in touch and I’ll arrange a free chat on the phone to talk about how I can help you.
Whilst I specialise in Career Coaching, as you can see, the skill of Coaching can be applied to absolutely anything!
Enjoy!
