Your Coaching and People Consulting Partner
1.What is Coaching?
ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.
2. What is life coaching about?
Creates awareness to individuals on the inner potentials and strengths by partnering with a coach.
it evokes a deep sense of awareness of the self, motivations, values, drives, and gaps, and subconscious actions we do in our daily lives. These triggers enable our focus and redirect goals, efficiency, and productivity in the personal and professional lives.
partnering with a life coach creates reflective thinking and transformational shifts in our deeply rooted beliefs and value systems.
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3. What happens in a life coaching session?
Coaching is a creative partnership between a coach and a client. Sessions vary due to the client’s goals and the coach’s approach, usually, a structured format is followed for the coaching conversations based on ICF competencies and processes. A brief sequence of activities is appended below: -
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Establishing a coaching relationship between the client and coach. this will involve a coaching agreement which is usually documented.
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A coaching agreement builds trust, confidentiality, and process clarity with the client.
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The coaching relation is hence based on trust, and confidence, and being non-judgemental about the entire conversations.
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A coaching plan is set based on the life, business, individual development, and business goals depending upon the agenda for coaching.
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Timelines are drawn for goal setting and commitment agreed upon.
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Coach gives exercises and subjects to reflect upon, which may be worksheets or just thoughts and questions to ponder.
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Review and revisit based on the requirement.
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4. How could a coaching session be done?
This could be an in-person meeting or a live video chat based on agreed terms.
Options to use various tools and exercises exist while in in-person coaching conversations, however, online methods are equally effective depending upon the agenda.
For certain types of agendas, online coaching may prove most effective than in-person coaching, this purely depends upon the mind-frame of the coachee and the tools available with the coach.
A coaching conversation may extend to 1 hour each session. The first session could be a discovery and goal setting session.
The financial terms and payment process could be flexible as mutually agreed. This could be decided per session or based on a complete desired outcome or package.
Usually, 5-6 sessions will be required to get a productive outcome to the agenda at hand.
5. What difference between Coaching, Mentoring, Training and Counselling & Therapy ?
Coaching
Coaching is a collaborative conversation between coach and coachee. The Coach guides the coachee through a reflective and discovery process to make aware the strengths and possibilities and also highlighting the blind spots of the coachee. It is a partnering activity to arrive at goals and performance enhancement for various life and professional agendas. The ownership and commitment are from the client or the coachee. A coach challenges the status quo and stimulates discussions based on their client’s strengths and already available resources. The coach acts as a mindful mediator to help its counterparts arrive at their desired destination.
Mentoring
Mentoring is a supportive process between the mentor and mentee in a personal or organizational context. The information is usually unidirectional, wherein the knowledge experience, and skill sets are imparted to the mentee . There is a formal or informal transfer of the information to the mentee. The mentee can explore the situation with inquiry and clarifications. The focus is on the mentee’s goals and requirements in the personal and professional space. The mentor is usually an expert on the subject.
Training
Training is personal or organization transfer and imparting of various skills and knowledge based on the prescribed curriculum. It seeks interventions based on gap analysis and training needs. The method is mostly directive and outcome based on the trainer and organization requirements. Training categorizes various grades around the outcome and measures skill and knowledge attainment.
Counseling & Therapy
It is done by a licensed healthcare professional. The conversations with a therapist dwell around usually the past, beliefs, and habits that have a retrograde effect on the person or its influence on the profession of an individual. Therapy is not only past focused, but also focused on the problem and will have a cognitive and behavioral effect on the subject. Akin to coaching the process aims to bring self-understanding and acceptance. The psychological; and technical expertise of the therapist is very vital in therapy. The process is typically retrospective and may involve the collaboration of medical interventions.
Consulting
This again like mentoring involves subject matter expertise. Consulting is giving expert advice to people working in a professional or technical field. A consultant passes the level of expertise to other entrepreneurs, who are willing to pay to access this knowledge. Consultants do the research about an issue or problem at hand and apply suitable interventions to resolve it. The client pays for the expertise and recommendations.
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