Life Coaching is a relationship between two people, the coach and the client and is about helping a client to achieve whatever they want in life.
Coaching is the art of facilitating the performance, learning and development of an individual, or in the corporate world, a team.
Everyone has this potential and through life coaching, anyone can take an idea (or a dream) and turn it into reality. It is about focus, intent, commitment and enthusiasm from both sides. More importantly, it is about results that can be seen, experienced, measured and quantified.
Coaching is also a powerful aid to training. A recent survey suggested that coaching combined with training increased the effectiveness of the training by 70% of the training alone. Coaching encourages learning, invites creativity and delivers higher performance.
Some people link coaching to that of counselling or mentoring - it is like NONE of these!
2. When is counselling put into effect?
Counselling could arise when a patient may have a problem arising from a specific incident, condition or trauma - e.g. accident, divorce, bereavement or business failure. This would allow the counsellor to look to the past for solutions to the problem. Mentoring is concerned with a specific task, project or process - the mentor is someone wiser and older who is expected to know the answer.
A life coach is not concerned with the past - Coaching is about now and the future! A life coach has no answers - instead they have awareness that everyone has the answers within themselves. The skill and practise of coaching is to help the client find those answers within and to bring them to the surface where they can be converted into the energy that is positive action. There are no prescriptions in coaching. It is a holistic profession where every client is accepted as the special individual that they truly are.
3. Twin Options
The growth of life coaching in the UK has been phenomenal since 1999. This demand has been fired almost totally by word of mouth recommendation from people who have transformed their lives with the help of their coach.
- Individual Coaching is a one to one relationship between coach and client. It usually follows the format of weekly telephone sessions by prior appointment, each lasting around an hour. Coaching is a practical and holistic process and is totally results oriented. Your life coach brings training, experience, care, skill and absolute confidentiality. You bring any concerns that you have about relationships, values, business, career, finance, personal values, guilt or fear. (The list is endless!)
- Corporate Coaching acknowledges that any business or company is made up of individuals. Unless they all share common objectives and buy into the company ethos and culture, there will be a lack of productivity. A one to one relationship is still maintained but, most corporate coaches will conduct face to face sessions on your premises. In coaching, there is no success or failure, there is only the result of an action.
'Life Coaching may not be magic - but the results are certainly magical'
For further information - please contact IMA Coaching at i.mackay@connectfree.co.uk
