Most top performers in sport, art, music and business have a coach, but coaching is not for everyone. A coach can only hold up a road map for you. You have to be determined to drive your own success. Coaching is for people who want to take control of their lives and motor themselves to the next level.

 

Anyone interested in growing, developing and operating at their peak should consider having a coach. Top performers in music, sports and arts use coaches to provide support, structure and feedback on how to get to or maintain peak performance. Coaching is only for people that are committed to their success.

 

How you can benefit from coaching

 

Just imagine a combination of your best friend, your most cherished teacher, your most hard-nosed manager, and your most positive guru available and committed to your personal development.

 

How much more will you achieve when these resources are available to you?

 

A coach will provide you all of this and more.

 

Is this not counselling or therapy?

 

There is some overlap between counselling, therapy and coaching, but they are definitely not the same thing. An over simplified explanation of the difference might be that counselling and therapy are about deep exploration of past issue in order to fix the present. Coaching is all about holding focus and commitment about development from now and into the future.  Well trained and experienced coaches will be able to advise you on your needs for coaching or counselling.

 

Are there different forms of coaching?

 

There are many different types of coaching situations. Coaches and companies also have different names for branding purposes. Generally you can split coaching in to five broad categories.

 

Positive Performance Coaching

 

If you get the sense that you could get more or better performance from yourself in a particular area then a performance coach might suit your needs. You often see these sorts of coaches in business and sports and they sometimes specialise in a particular area for example a sales coach or a tennis coach.

 

Since coaching is about personal discovery your coach does not need any technical skills or experience in the area you are looking at. Often technically specialised coaches such as NLP or Hypnotic Coaches can cross over many areas of specialisations because of their technical coaching ability. Many coaches understand the benefits of good NLP Training to compliment their coaching skills.

 

Life Coaching

 

Life coaching is a more generic brand of coaching and can cover a whole multitude of areas. Some take a wheel of life approach and will facilitate your relationship between the goals in one area of your life with other areas. For example you may be finding personal relationships difficult because you are not fulfilling your career goals. By taking a holistic view of your life you may discover insights that support your overall development.

 

Executive Coaching

 

Executive coaching general revolves around leadership style and impact. Most Executive Coaches will take their clients through a personality profiling system and look at their impact on their business relationships. Through these technical tools an executive coach will facilitate their client towards personal insights, growth and development.

 

Special events Coaching

 

You often find coaches that specialise in a particular area, presentations or writing and publishing books for example. Usually these sorts of coaches have particular experience and specialist skills for the area they are looking at.

 

Accelerated Success BreakThrough Coaching Sessions

 

A highly specialised area of coaching that requires skilled use of hypnosis and NLP. These are short, single time interventions. The sessions centre on looking at big stretching goals and then removing any psychological blocks to success. Not all clients are suitable for this sort of intervention and any coach working in this area will pre-qualify their clients for this.

 

 

How does coaching work?

 

Along with different types of coaching there are many different formats and ways of coaching from face to face to email and telephone coaching. The best advice is always going to be match your personal preference and circumstances with the coach.

 

Generally before starting with your coach there will be an initial consultation where you can find out more about how the relationship will work and if you will be comfortable with it. At this session you will negotiate with your prospective coach about the number of sessions, times and duration.

 

Coaching sessions usually involve agreeing outcomes for the session in line with the overall programme outcomes and then targeted discussions centring on the key themes, with an action plan for you to take away and deliver for the next session. But again this is a broad generalisation and many coaches have a completely different format.

 

Picking a coach

 

Picking the right coach could lead you to great results and therefore it is worth spending the time up front to get a coach that suits your needs. Skills, experience and qualifications are difficult to judge with coaches. When looking at for a coach there are two main areas I look at before going in to any depth.

 

Firstly I want to know I can be open, comfortable and build some rapport with my coach. If I donâ019t feel a depth of rapport on our initial consultation I already know that coach is not for me.

 

My second criterion is to look at previous work and clients to see how much matches with my needs. I go on personal recommendations and / or reference clients.

 

You can find a fuller discussion on how to find the right coach for you on the website.