Innovate Your Life with Coaching

3 minute read

The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as:

“Partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential”.

What Coaching Is

Coaching unleashes the power and potential within a person, it is future focussed and provides a motivation for fast action. Coaching helps a person to remove obstacles and unlock their resources on their own terms.

What Coaching Is Not

Coaching is not a counselling session, there should be no telling, judging, projecting, therapy, mentoring, parenting or assumptions coming from a coach.

What to Look for in a Coach

Look for the following qualities and attributes in a coach:

• Someone who asks genuine questions and listens to understand not to respond, they know they don’t have all the answers
• A person who encourages you to seek answers from within and knows that each person knows more about their own self and potential than any outsider
• Someone who accepts people for who they are and can put their own judgements and opinions aside – a master of objectivity
• Someone with a holistic life approach, who understands that each area of a person’s life is intertwined with and impacts the other
• A person who believes that you already have everything you need to pursue your goals
• An organised person who has plenty of resources to support them, and who is highly responsive with all forms of communication

What Differentiates a Coach from a Mentor or Therapist/Counsellor?

A mentor is someone with demonstrated specific life experience that reflects your future goals and aspirations, someone to admire and learn from.

A therapist/counsellor helps you to deal with past experiences and looks to the past to find solutions to an existing problem.

A coach focusses on the future and helps people to raise the bar, grow into their true magnificence and live the life of their dreams. A coach explores possibilities and guides a person through what else is possible right now.

The Benefits of Coaching

Coaching relationships provide fresh perspectives on personal challenges and opportunities. Coaching sessions enhance and enable a person’s thinking, interpersonal effectiveness and decision making skills while increasing confidence to carry out their chosen life roles.

People often engage coaches to develop their potential and facilitate major life transition, act as a sounding board and to address self-limiting behaviours.