07792 689857My role as a coach is to hold the space for you to discover the clarity, courage and commitment you need to change your experience of work and life and deepen the connections that matter.
People come to work with me for different reasons. It doesn’t matter if you are student experiencing anxiety, an executive leader on a board, or a nurse in a hospital ward, coaching is about opening up possibilities, to explore what you might be capable of, and in realising who you are.
- Are you going through stuff? Perhaps anxious, stressed or ill and needing to feel more resourced, resilient and with choice
- Are you navigating some kind of change? Perhaps unsure or stuck about work, career or lifestyle, and wanting to create possibility and find direction.
- Are you feeling a sense of wanting to come home to yourself? Perhaps feeling unfulfilled and seeking the courage to be fully alive, at peace and find joy.
The agenda for coaching is yours and will involve engaging with what you do as well as your presence in the world.
Coaching is usually my phone or Zoom. Contact me for a no-obligation 30 minute call to find out how coaching might work for you and, if so, whether I’m the right coach or can recommend someone else.
Clarity, Courage, Commitment and Connection
Clarity – coaching provokes a radical awareness of, and honesty about, what you are experiencing, about what is important to you, and about the possibility of alternative perspectives.
Courage – coaching challenges you to find the courage to explore, discover, and engage with what really matters to you, with what fulfils you, your inner resources and how to be true to yourself.
Commitment – with clarity and courage, coaching challenges you to make a commitment to what you do, the goals you set, and how you engage with the world.
Connection – coaching provokes an encounter between your world within (your experience, perspective and values) and with the world around you (what you do, your relationships and your environment).
What’s involved?
Responding to, and in conversation with you, my coaching can be light, humorous, vibrant, and energising. At the same time it can be difficult, challenging, disruptive, involving fierce questions and looking awry for alternative perspectives. It can also provide some solace while at the same time evoking you to move forwards. Emotions, metaphor, embodied experience, stretching comfort zones all come to play a role. I also increasingly bring meditations into coaching where it feels appropriate to you, particularly to enhance noticing what is present now.
A typical coaching package would involve an initial ‘discovery’ session (1.5 hours) in which we’d identify what you need for the coaching to work for you, explore what really matters to you and gain clarity over what it would be like if the coaching was successful. This would be followed by approximately 6 sessions (45 minutes each), usually fortnightly (sometimes weekly if appropriate).
Coaching, Mentoring, Counselling, Therapy.
There is much debate about the differences in principle and practice between coaching, mentoring, therapy, manager coaches etc. and also about the role of coaching alongside other ‘talking professions’. As a Certified Professional Coactive Coach I stand by some basic distinctions. Though I recognise this is simplistic, in contrast to the mentor as specific expert, counsellor as listener, and therapist as analyst, coaching holds a space in which you are the expert in your life. Coaching works with you has a whole person, trusts that there is nothing ‘broken’ that needs fixing, and ensures learning takes place through bridging reflection with action. My expertise is in using coaching techniques to provoke clarity, courage and commitment for your own self-understanding.
Context matters
As a Sociologist I’m aware that coaching can be seen as too focused on the individual, and is sometimes seen as an instrument for organisational efficiency and effectiveness. Some coaching certainly appears so. It would be lazy and disingenuous however to reduce it to that. Through my experience of working with clients from a range of backgrounds, I see that coaching offers a powerful format for looking in-depth and awry at oneself in relation to social context, provoking cognitive and emotional reflexivity in ways that can lead to changing the status quo, and so aligning coaching closely to an emancipatory ethics (see Simon Western’s Coaching and mentoring: a critical text).