Therapy: Therapy deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or in relationships. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past. Coaching is future focused. It supports personal and professional growth based on self-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one’s work or personal life.

Consulting: Individuals or organizations retain consultants for their expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, the assumption is the consultant will diagnose problems and prescribe and, sometimes, implement solutions. With coaching, the assumption is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.

Mentoring: A mentor is an expert who provides wisdom and guidance based on his or her own experience. Mentoring may include advising, counseling and coaching. The coaching process does not include advising or counseling, and focuses instead on individuals or groups setting and reaching their own objectives.

Training: Training programs are based on objectives set out by the trainer or instructor. Though objectives are clarified in the coaching process, they are set by the individual or team being coached, with guidance provided by the coach.

Coaching should be considered as a working partnership. It typically begins with a personal interview by telephone or Skype call to assess your current opportunities and challenges, define the scope of the relationship, identify priorities for action and establish specific desired outcomes.

Subsequent coaching sessions are conducted in person or over Skype call, with each session lasting 60-90 minutes

A variety of assessments, concepts, models and principles drawn from the behavioral sciences and management literature will be incorporated into the coaching conversation.

Your desire to change is the key success factor. Trust, appreciation and openness are equally basic prerequisites in the coaching process. Within this partnership, what are we going to do?

I as a Coach:

• Provide you objective assessment and observations that foster your self-awareness and awareness of others
• Listen closely to fully understand your circumstances
• Act as a sounding board in exploring possibilities and implementing thoughtful planning and decision making
• Champion opportunities and potential, encouraging stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations
• Foster shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives
• Challenge blind spots to illuminate new possibilities and support the creation of alternative scenarios
• Maintain professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adhering to the coaching profession’s code of ethics

You as a Client:

• Take courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations
• Engage big-picture thinking and problem-solving skills
• Take the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by me as a coach and engage in effective forward actions
• Challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and develop new ones that serve your goals in a superior way.
• Leverage personal strengths and overcome limitations to develop a winning style.
• Take decisive actions, no matter how uncomfortable they are and despite personal insecurities, to reach for the extraordinary.
• Show compassion for yourself while learning new behaviors and experiencing setbacks
• Have the courage to reach for more than before while engaging in continual self-examination without fear.

Measurement may be thought of in two distinct ways: external indicators of performance and internal indicators of success. Ideally, both are incorporated.

Examples of external measures include achievement of coaching goals established at the outset of the coaching relationship, increased income/revenue, obtaining a promotion, performance feedback that is obtained from a sample of the individual’s constituents (e.g., direct reports, colleagues, customers, boss, the manager her/himself), personal and/or business performance data (e.g. productivity, efficiency measures). The external measures selected should be things you already measure and you therefore have the possibility to directly influence.

Examples of internal measures include self-scoring/self-validating assessments that can be administered initially and at regular intervals in the coaching process, changes in your self-awareness and awareness of others, shifts in thinking that create more effective actions, and shifts in your emotional state that inspire confidence.