Do you need a coach? That’s a very good question.
Here is a question that will help you answer yours:
Do you want to live life by Default or do you want to live life by Design, by Unleashing your untapped potential?
If you are even thinking about moving from life by Default towards life by Design, then you need a coach.
Why?
Let me show you what happened when I worked with a UK HR manager who wanted to work out of Europe.
In the video, I told you about the work I did with a UK HR manager who wanted to expand her career trajectory from working in the UK to working out of Europe.
She knew that her organisation was expanding into Europe, and she wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to take a big step forward in her career. She had decided to design her career and her life but she did not know how to proceed.
For six months, I worked with her helping to build her confidence, her resilience and her ability to have powerful conversations for possibilities and actions. This means that she got to a position where she could start conversations about her career move and create concrete proposals on actions she needed and wanted to take. In the end, she applied for a role in Europe and was successful beyond her expectations.
Her organisation offered her not only the role in Europe she had applied for but combined it with her role as the UK HR manager. In the process, she also saved her company a lot of money.
Did she need a coach?
The simple answer, in the video, was: Yes, she did.
Let me peel back the curtain and show you the complexity behind this answer.
Our role as coaches is to support the development of individuals and organisations when they acknowledge the need for it. We don’t create the need, we support it when our clients seek it.
Often times they have a glaring requirement to upskill a team or person. At other times, there is just a recognition of the need to explore the next level of growth. In other words, to heed the call for an evolving consciousness.
So how does coaching happen?
Our starting point is to ask you some of the following questions in order to begin to explore the issue or challenge.
- In what way are you stuck?
- Why is this issue important to you at this time of your life?
- What possibility are you committed to creating for yourself or your team?
- What actions have you tried to fulfil your commitment? What worked? What didn’t work? How do you know this?
We employ powerful questioning to help us understand what’s “underneath” this issue or challenge.
In many cases, it may not occur to you that there is more than one possible assessment of a situation. Our role as coaches is to take a 3D scan via our assessments to find out what is really going on.
At An Examined Life, the Coaching approach is rigorous and demanding. We practice Integral Development Coaching.
We really believe in learning about what our clients are up to, so we seek to assess in a way that gives us the clearest picture with the highest resolution of what we are dealing with. That means looking at the challenge or issue in a particular way. Here, assessment is key.
- We spend a lot of time learning about you and your team. On an individual level, we have a number of conversations, which look at the different areas of your life.
- We take into account body sensations, thoughts and intentions.
- We also talk about how life manifests in terms of your behaviours and how you think this is observed and interpreted by others.
- We will talk about the culture in which you live, your relationships.
- We will also observe the language you use to describe your life.
- Additionally, we explore your experience of home, work, belief systems and support.
Because our knowledge tells us that the need for development shows up in more than one life domain, we look for correlated phenomena in order to get at any blind spots and to get an integral understanding of the area of development.
We then dig even deeper and assess even further using an analytical tool designed to see how Emotionally Intelligent you are.
Empirical studies from Harvard, Rutgers and Stanford Universities show that Emotional Intelligence trumps IQ as being THE tool for creating the highest level of effectiveness in work and life.
We want that for you, so we do look deeply at your level of Self-awareness, Self-regulation, Motivation, Empathy and Social Skill.
By now, we begin to see what competences and skills sets are missing with regards to the challenge you have brought. A picture is beginning to emerge. It is a bit like the old fashioned way of developing photos in a darkened lab.
Our third analytical tool seeks to establish how developed you are, not just as a mother, brother, boss or colleague, but also how developed you are as a person.
Our way of being in the world, highlights how developed we are as a person, whether we are aware of it or not. Our way of being shapes how we understand ourselves, others and the world around us. It shapes how we respond to what we understand at the most fundamental level.
This is why we coach the person and not the challenge. We coach teams at the level of the individual. We help people and teams to develop new and deeper ways of being.
By now you will have noticed that our approach is to co-create skilfully a certain level of Self-awareness in our clients to help release their deepest potential.
This can be (and is usually) a profound experience. However, when Self-awareness is underpinned by Willingness, Courage and Support, our experience has been that the right conditions emerge enabling anyone to flourish and access their full potential.
Coaching is a co-creative relationship. The coach does not generate development, coaching does. This includes all that occurs within the coaching relationship and the actions clients take that stem from this.
So why do you need a coach?
A coach offers you to grasp the opportunity to go from living life by Default to unleashing untapped potential – living life by Design. Our Integral Development Coaching enables you to do just that.
If you wish to know more or work with me as a coach, call me on +44 (0)7983 164 667 or click here to head to the contact page.
