HOW I COACH:
HOW I COACH:
CO-CREATIVE
Think of coaching as your “me time” with professional support that helps you to use that time in movement towards your desired outcome. If you decide to work with me and I become your coach, each of us is going to play an important, yet different, role in that common process, and your results will depend on both of us.
You will be the one that defines the purpose, themes and desired outcomes of our sessions.
I will take care of the environment and structure of our sessions, offering you diverse coaching techniques, tools and inputs, and it will be you choosing from them and also deciding where it might be most useful for you to direct our attention and focus next.
Perhaps most importantly within my role, I will be leading the coaching conversation and using my knowledge, skills and experience for leading it in a way that helps you progress towards your goal. I will be creating the kind of space in which you are able to be “at your best”, by being accepted and safe also when you feel at your “worst”. The kind of space in which you are not obliged to speak only when you are “pulled together”, structured and clear. I will listen without judgement and aim to understand you and help you untangle your thoughts. In the coaching space, you can name and explore your thoughts and feelings freely in their complexity and depth, embrace whatever you might be going through right then and there. I will offer you my professional presence and human compassion.
I will observe and share my observations with you, offering a mirror, re-frame, challenging you in a supportive way that can help you face topics that might be hard to face alone. I can help you see potential blind spots, new links and alternative perspectives. I will be asking you many questions, and they will be meant to help you deepen your own understanding and find your own answers.
You will be determining our “pace”, also directly during the session. You will be able to slow us down when you need to, and accelerate when you decide it is time for it. You will also choose the length of sessions that works best for you, and your preference might change throughout our collaboration, in any direction. Different lengths work for different people and also towards different goals, and I offer flexibility in that.
I will help you give things a structure and design a strategy and an action plan, and I will support you along the way.
I will help you learn how to attain, keep and, if needed, return to the track you choose for the next chapter in your professional and private life.
You will be the one walking the journey. You will be bringing the outcome of our sessions into practice in your life.
The progress and results of our sessions we will thus be creating together.
NON-ADVISORY
I offer coaching free of advice.
It means that I am not going to tell you what you should or should not do, or which option you should choose. On the contrary, I will use my knowledge, skills and resources to minimize forming strong opinions on your options and choices – and thus remain present and focused on you.
I am not going to tell you how the world, love and life work, either. I do not possess that knowledge. I am myself walking my own journey of exploring life, with curiosity, trying to keep my mind and heart as open as I can, continually discovering and learning new things. So instead of pretending that I can answer any existential questions you might have about your life, what I will do is hold space for you, so that you can explore and actively shape your own personal truth and reality.
Offering coaching without advice is a choice that has evolved and settled in me through years of education, training, practice with clients, as well as my own experience of being coached:
I have experienced both options, pure, non-advisory coaching and a combination of coaching and advising, which often seems to be provided under the name of “coaching”, and I have experienced them from different perspectives: as a coach, as a client, and as an observer/supervisor. I have progressively grown towards the belief that coaching is most powerful when it remains completely non-advisory. This does not mean that I cannot see how advising services might come in useful at times! I just consider it more effective to keep the two types of support separate.
I believe in the real potential of every individual to clarify, decide and solve the core part of situations by using her or his own inner wisdom, and I see the primary purpose of coaching to be helping individuals to do that: to re-connect with those parts of our inner wisdom and own potential that we sometimes struggle to connect with when we are distracted and overwhelmed by input and advice from outside. I am of the opinion that mixing coaching and advising within the same service might prevent the client from discovering their hidden inner resources to the full, from clarity about what their actual preference is, and also from addressing potential elements through which they might be standing in their own way, such as limiting beliefs, inner critic, indecisiveness etc. I believe that for me to give you advice would inhibit and distract the process of your self-discovery, and that I can help you get to your own insights and solutions far better and faster if I do not mix the coaching process with interjecting my own opinions and advice.
That is why I choose to do my coaching the non-advisory way and that is also why I choose to coach following the guidelines of the International Coach Federation that also encourages coaching as a strictly non-advisory type of support.
TANGIBLE AND INTANGIBLE GOALS ARE EQUALLY VALID
Coaching is the place and time in which you can address any question you consider important in order to move on in a chosen direction, and that “moving on” sometimes means action and achieving tangible results, and other times it can mean for example gaining more understanding and clarity or progressing with a decision. Defining the goal of each session, a so-called desired outcome, will always be up to you; coaching honours, and can help you towards, both types of goal, inner and outer, and towards forming a bridge between them.
ECLECTIC
I use my combined background in coaching, psychology and therapy, and within each of them, I have been influenced by diverse schools and concepts. As a coach, I do not keep strictly to one sole approach, but use a combination of them, and here is a list of those I feel have influenced me most so far:
HOLISTIC
I consider my coaching approach holistic in several ways including:
It addresses both the inner world and outer action;
I offer a combination of career and life coaching without drawing a line between the two, in order to address professional and private life as a whole;
I acknowledge body, mind and spirit interconnection;
My approach looks at the bigger picture of life and complex personal transformation processes, as opposed to helping solve just a single situation or struggle on its surface;
I recognize that learning and transformation is not an event but a continual process in which one might revisit the same themes and face their different layers, while continually moving forward.
REFLECTIVE PRACTICE
I am committed to being a reflective coaching practitioner, which means I am continually working on my own self-awareness through self-reflection, coaching and therapy, meditation, continual training, mentoring and supervision - in order to minimize polluting the coaching space that I create for my clients with my own potential unprocessed experience, unconscious beliefs and attitudes.
I also collect and use clients´ feedback, and I encourage my clients to help me see my own blind spots and potential for professional and personal growth.
ELIMINATING BIAS
A note about impartiality and eliminating bias:
While knowing that as a human being I might never be able to be completely bias-free, I still aim at growing my awareness of my own biases and eliminating them as a coach and as a person. For me, this is an important goal that defines the direction in which I would like to evolve.
At the same time, I do recognize that choosing coaching as the service I want to offer, already reflects on my personal values, paradigms and beliefs, which means I am bringing them into the coaching space and use them as the foundations of my work.
Here are some examples of my personal values and beliefs that I recognize have shaped my service and coaching style:
I believe in self-awareness as a tool towards inner peace, joy and profound connection with others.
I believe that self-change is possible.
I trust in the human kind and its resourcefulness. I believe that we already carry within ourselves all we might ever need in order to find fulfilment, balance and joy in life. I believe that clients, in the right conditions and with support, can come up with the best possible solutions for themselves, better than me or any other expert could ever come up with if we step beyond our supportive roles and try to take over the case.
I honour love, respect, purposefulness, authenticity and honesty, and I see most beauty in the ability to embrace also imperfections, mistakes and flaws, in accepting our humanity and wholeness.
I recognize the power of naming goals and working towards them, but also the complementary power in the ability to let the goals go and find joy in the journey itself.
I consider science and spirituality to be perfectly compatible and take a lot of inspiration from those who have mastered communicating the bridge, C.G. Jung and Brené Brown among many.
I will respect your potentially different values, life views and choices. I will honour the space between you and me, and any potential differences, be they of gender, religion, culture or any other matter, and will facilitate dynamics between us in which the differences can serve our mutual growth as opposed to standing in the way.
Does my approach speak to you?
Might this kind of coaching be what can help you grow right now?
Then do not hesitate to get in touch with me and we can take it one step further: arrange to talk, after which both of us can assess whether we might be a good match for working together. You will have an opportunity to learn more about my work, and also to experience it, before making any further commitments. Working together only if it brings you results is as important to me as it is to you.
