WHAT IS COACHING?

Coaching is the providing of performance advice and the facilitation of performance improvement or transformation. The goal of coaching is to bridge the gap between the current level of performance and the desired level of performance and/or outcome. In short, coaching offers a new paradigm for change. This change may be professional and/or involve personal transformation. Coaching originally begin in sports and fitness. Part of this training will be based on models of highly successful Olympic Coaches including the coach who has coached in more Olympics than any coach in any sport in the entire history of the Olympics. In the business and professional world coaching is becoming recognized as a primary path to performance enhancement. This may involve executive coaching, leadership coaching, management coaching, team coaching, corporate coaching, public speaking coaching or coaching on any business or professional skills. There is a growing recognition in business that coaching needs to be a tool of every manager. Often coaching trainings merely focus on how to facilitate outcomes, because the trainers lack an understanding of hard business skills.

Learn cutting edge coaching techniques modelled over 20 years from the most effective business leaders

This training is partly based on models developed over 20 years of highly effective business leaders. It also draws on over 30 years of business coaching and consulting. Life skills coaching focuses on personal transformation and personal growth. It may involve life skills, social and relational skills, economic and wealth acquisition skills, stress management skills, emotional intelligence skills and any other skill that will help a person to improve the quality of their life. In this training you will not just be taught process coaching but highly effective models to improve critical life skills. Coaching differs from and may include components of other performance enhancement activities. These include training which is a set of activities that provides the opportunity to acquire and improve specific skills. Mentoring involves the guidance and development of a protge by a more experienced or senior person. Counseling is the giving of advice from a more knowledgeable person to a less experienced person in order to address specific issues and situations. Consulting is the providing of technical expertise to diagnose and resolve specific classes of complex issues. And therapy is a process of assisting a person to resolve issues that make a person dysfunctional or unable to cope adequately with life situations. Boundaries between these areas and become blurred and the effective coach may need to engage in any or all of these activities depending on the circumstances. Performance coaching includes both process-based coaching which is content free and skill coaching which is often content intensive. Many coaching trainings only focus on process because the trainers lack the skill sets to deal with both. Performance enhancement arises out of a synergy between focusing on both process and content. Performance coaching may be remedial involving correction and/or competency acquisition or it may be maintenance only. At the high end performance coaching becomes developmental and focuses on optimization and performance enhancement.

EXECUTIVE COACHING

This training will cover all aspects of business and life skills coaching. One area of emphasis will be executive coaching. The following provides a more in depth description of this area of coaching. Fortune Magazine says that: One to one performance coaching is the way for both organizations and individuals to significantly impact the bottom line. Executive coaching is a structured, outcome-led process whereby a coach guides a manager through business problems and challenges in order to: clarify issues, challenge limiting beliefs, generate solutions, evaluate options, and decide on a final course of action. This is accomplished by utilizing the managers own unique resources in order to create outstanding performance. In short, the job of the Executive Coach is to facilitate lasting behavioral change. It is widely acknowledged that the development of non-technical skills in the workplace best occurs by: (a) working through real world situations, (b) continually practicing newly acquired skills over the course of time and (c) using tried and tested models of such skills as: leadership, management, communication, influence, negotiation, problem-solving, decision making, motivation, self-esteem, emotional intelligence, etc. Executive Coaching is recognized as the most effective way of delivering these three critical elements in the workplace and has been shown in large scale studies to be more effective than traditional training courses, executive retreats and computer-based programs. Today, there is an increasing awareness of the critical role of emotional intelligence in the workplace. Fortunately, emotional intelligence can be acquired and developed , and the most effective method for this is Executive Coaching. All managers at some time have been in the situation of knowing what they want to do, being capable of doing it, but still not being able to do it. In this case, purpose plus motivation is not enough. In these situations which occur on a daily basis, Executive Coaching may be the only viable approach in such cases.. The question may be asked as to what the relation is between Executive Coaching and psychology. Simply put, psychology helps people who are dysfunctional to function or cope. Executive coaching takes people who are functional and works to make them into high achievers. Although each situation is unique, Executive Coaching usually arises from one of two sets of circumstances. The first is that a manager or senior executive realizes that his/her career could be enhanced by working with an Executive Coach. He/she will usually have some specific outcomes and will have already identified some areas on which to initially focus.. The second situation is where an organization decides to invest in an Executive Coaching Program for one or more managers, either to develop their potential or to help overcome some obstacle to their further development. In this situation, both the organization and the manager to be coached may have different goals and expectations. In either case, the Executive Coaching Process begins with a meeting between the Executive Coach and the organization and/or manager to set outcomes for the process. After an assessment of the manager and the situation, a program is then developed to fit the specific needs. The Executive Coach will meet with the manager in person or by phone for a specified period of time to accomplish the agreed upon objectives. These sessions are focused on change and involve direct feedback designed to assist the manager in making behavioral changes. Managers may be resistant to change and the effectiveness of the process is directly related to the willingness of the manager to modify his/her behavior.