1. What is coaching?
Coaching is a professional partnership to assist you in achieving more fulfilling results in whatever it is that you are pursuing. In addition a life coach also helps you with better work-life integration. Through the process of coaching, you focus on the skills and actions needed to successfully produce personally and professionally purposeful results.
2. What does the coaching process look like?
In my case coaching begins with an intake questionnaire that makes you reflect on your past and on your behavior patterns that you observe in your own career and life. Together with your résumé, this gives me enough insight about where we can start with making things better This preparation I do on my own before the first session. The first session is then held, either in-person for local clients or by phone for remote clients, to assess your current opportunities and challenges, to define the scope of the coaching relationship, to identify priorities for action, and to establish specific desired outcomes. A plan of action is then established in the first session with clear accountabilities for creating outcomes and timelines. Subsequent coaching sessions are scheduled depending on where the client will need help in moving forward. Between scheduled coaching sessions, you may be asked to complete specific actions that support the achievement of your personally prioritized goals. I generally provide additional resources in the form of my own developed materials, resources, relevant articles, checklists, assessments, or models, to support your thinking and actions. I may also ask to read some books to help you further.
There is enough that comes out of the first session that some clients are able to move forward on their own with re-energized action and outlook. There is no requirement to continue, on a regular schedule, if your constraints do not allow it.
3. Where do we meet?
Coaching sessions occur both in-person and over the phone, creating the most flexibility for you. My clients are global, so whatever mode of connection works best is what will be used in each session. Often, email exchanges are equally effective. Sessions are also conducted using the latest available technologies such as Webinars, video conferences, in-person, and on-site workshops for larger groups. 4. What should someone look for when selecting a coach?
There are three Cs of coach selection: Chemistry, Compatibility, and Competency. The first two are critical for a harmonious engagement. Respect for the relationship comes from these two factors. Respect for what the coach has to say comes from the third factor. The most important thing to look for in selecting a coach is someone with whom you feel you can easily relate to and can create the most powerful partnership. Additional considerations include the coach’s experience, client testimonials, coaching success stories, and coaching philosophies. 5. How long does a coach work with an individual?
In the case of career coaching the trigger is the realization that something is amiss in your career: a missed promotion, a raise that did not materialize, glass ceiling, repeated lay-offs, and so on. If you have your own venture or business it can be that the business is not growing or that the customers are leaving. In most cases clients begin their engagement with a specific problem and to remedy a specific wrong. In most cases, however, they soon realize that they had been short-changing themselves in how they managed their career and engage with me on an ongoing basis. There is no requirement for a contractual engagement beyond the first session. The length of a coaching partnership varies depending on your needs and preferences. For certain types of focused coaching a few months (2-4 sessions) of working together may be sufficient. For other types of coaching, people may find it beneficial to work for a longer period. 6. How do I get started?
Prospective clients first have a brief telecon with me, after which the Client Intake Questionnaire is sent along with the Agreement. This Questionnaire is a careful distillation of what information is critical to understanding the prospect’s history and what patterns in this history can be addressed through coaching. Most clients have personally told me how insightful this Questionnaire alone is in how much it brought clarity to their own view of themselves, even before the first meeting.
This first paid meeting then takes place (in-person for local clients and on-phone for remote clients) and is typically about two hours. During this session, you’ll share additional information and what you want to specifically achieve immediately and long-term. We don’t spend this valuable time revisiting the Questionnaire unless there are some items that must be addressed. At the end of this session you will walk away with a plan of action, specific changes you need to make to move forward, and a timeline for next steps. What you want to do beyond that will depend on what you decide is going to work for you and how effective future coaching sessions will be. My own philosophy is to get each client to think for themselves and become independent on their own quickly, using me only as a resource and a sounding board, when they need objective and specific expertise or when they feel stuck.
7. How is coaching different from therapy and other interventions?
Career coaching is a distinct service which focuses on your life as it relates to goal setting, outcome creation and personal change management to improve your career. In an effort to understand what a career and life coach is, it can be helpful to distinguish coaching from other professions that provide personal or organizational support.
a) Therapy: Coaching can be distinguished from therapy in a number of ways. First, coaching is a profession that supports personal and professional growth and development based on individual-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is forward moving and future focused. Therapy, on the other hand, deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or a relationship between two or more individuals. Therapy outcomes often include improved emotional/feeling states. 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. The emphasis in a coaching relationship is on action, accountability, and follow-through. Most successful professionals work with several coaches to keep them in top shape. For example, Tiger Woods is known to have several coaches who help him in his game, his spiritual balance, and his physical well-being.
b) Counseling: The process of counseling has a connotation that something needs to be remedied. It is a thereapeutic process where a trained expert counsels their client to correct an observed malfunction or deals with the client's emotional or psychological problems. Career counseling was term used until about a decade ago, but is now in disuse because of this connotation. Career Coaching is a much more acceptable and neutral term. When counseling is coupled with other intervention (medication) it can be called therapy.
c) Consulting: Consultants may be retained by individuals or organizations for the purpose of accessing specialized expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, there is often an assumption that the consultant diagnoses problems and prescribes and sometimes implements solutions. In general, the assumption with coaching is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks, with sufficient content expertise provided from the coach’s own past.
d) Mentoring: Mentoring, which can be thought of as guiding from one’s own experience or sharing of experience in a specific area of industry or career development, is sometimes confused with coaching. Although some coaches provide mentoring as part of their coaching, that is not their main focus. Typically a mentor is someone you select from your industry, organization, or community from whom to seek guidance and wisdom. Mentoring provides general guidance, whereas coaching can provide very specific actionable guidance.
e) Training: Training programs are based on the acquisition of certain learning objectives as 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. Training also assumes a linear learning path which coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear without a set curriculum plan.
f) Seeking Guidance: Many professionals seek guidance from their friends and relatives when it comes to making career choices and managing their career. Although this is a good idea because it can help get another perspective—often for free, too much reliance on such advice can be limiting. For one, there is the lack of proper clinical distance between the two, which can cause the party giving advice to give it so in a subjective way or with having their own agenda in how things need to be done. There is also the danger that if the advice is not followed it can damage a good relationship. Also, there is the possibility of lack of expertise. Often, in such cases the advice often smacks of what the person giving advice missed out on for themselves (projection) in a similar situation. When one is in a bind or is confused about which option to choose, there is a tendency to listen to whoever has the most influence on you and to follow their advice, regardless of its merit, sometimes just to please them. This is not always a good idea. Besides, an expert advice often provides value that is worth the money spent on it. Trial and error is the worst way to manage one’s career or life!
8. How can I justify the cost of coaching to myself?
Actually, this is the easy part!Most professionals manage their career by trial and error. In each pass valuable time passes and the learning does not always translate into better actions for the next round of experiences. A lost opportunity and its cost can be incalculable when handled in a desultory way. Often we operate from the state of unconscious incompetence (we do not know what we do not know). This is the worst place to be when trying to deal with a new, unknown situation.
Moving from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence is what a coach can help you do. Once you are in this state then it is much easier to move to the conscious competence and to the ultimate unconscious competence. This final state is where the right behaviors come naturally as a result of productive coaching and disciplined self-awareness. The difference between approaching a career (or life) challenge with the proper mindset and tools and with an unprepared mind can be huge in terms of the price you pay. This price can be a lost opportunity, lost money, or just feeling defeated because you did not know better.
A battered psyche is your worst enemy in a highly competitive world. For a relatively small sum of money one does not have to wonder about this for not having done this correctly. This is the benefit of getting the right coaching and it can be priceless!
9. All I really need is a good résumé. How much will it cost me?
To be perfectly clear, I do not do client résumés! Instead, I work with them to re-package their message in a VERY different way!
Clients do most of the work which is critical to the foundation of what I call an Inductive résumé. The client must own how the message is torqued using this VERY different approach. Once clients do this basic work and reach the limit of their ability to elevate their message beyond where it is, then I take it from there and put my magic to the message—this is my own masala.
I help clients in this process depending on their writing skills and to create these Aha! stories about their past leadership accomplishments for a forward-looking message. Highly motivated clients (nearly 10%) use about one hour of my time (after the initial session) to complete the résumé if they do most of this work on their own. Others use my time as they need until they are able to own their message. Typically, it takes me about two to three hours of my time, depending on many factors. Creating a forward-looking résumé is a highly collaborative effort.
For an impactful Inductive résumé this shift in client mindset and their own diligent work to redefine what they did with their own Ahas! are critical. Most professional résumé writers, on the other hand, take your raw inputs and craft the entire message in their own format without adding any substantive value—the soul of a résumé. Merely shuffling around words and prettifying how a résumé looks does not really change how it impacts the reader in seeing differentiated value from a plethora of Jurassic résumés. There are many “before” and “after” examples in my books (e.g.The 7 Keys to a Dream Job: A Career Nirvana Playbook!) of how to transform a message using this approach to writing an Inductive résumé.
The first client meeting is about how to package yourself and about how to present your message that you can market yourself more effectively. A strong verbal brand is a key part of this message. But, this comes only from a shift of client's mindset. This SHIFT in mindset is critical to generating market traction. Résumé writing and building a marketing campaign follow this task.
If you are looking for someone to merely re-write your historical or backward-looking résumé (I call it a Jurassic résumé) to make it prettier for a few hundred dollars, I am not your answer. Sorry.
Most professionals write historical résumés (backward looking) and the ones that are about what the client has done. What is needed in today's market is a forward-looking résumé that is not about what the client has done, but about what they can do for the job that is of interest to them. This is what makes a résumé Inductive. This is not easy!
I have many named Recommendations on LinkedIn. I am sure you know some of these people who wrote them. It is best if you talk to them before managing your expectations about engaging me.
