Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches’ help people improve their performances and enhance the quality of their lives.

Coaches are trained to listen, to observe and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach's job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has.

What is coaching?

Coaching is a new profession. Coaches:

Help people set better goals and then to reach those goals.

Ask their clients to do more than they would have done on their own.

Support their clients to focus better to more quickly produce results.

Provide the tools, support and instruction to accomplish more.

How is coaching different from consulting? therapy? sports coaching?

Consulting. Coaching is a form of consulting. But the coach maintains contact with the client to help implement the new skills, changes and goals to make sure they really happen.

Therapy. Coaching is not therapy. We don't work on "issues" or get into the past or deal much with understanding human behavior. We leave that up to the client to know and figure out while we help them move forward and set personal and professional goals that will give them the life they really want.

Sports. Coaching includes several principles from sports coaching, like teamwork, going for the goal, being your best. But unlike sports coaching, most professional coaching is not competition or win/lose based. We strengthen the client's skills vs help them beat the other team. It's win/win.

Who hires a coach and why?

People hire a coach because:

They want more.

They want to grow.

They want it easier.

It's as simple as that. Coaches help a client get all three. Quickly.

Why does coaching work?

Coaching works for several reasons:

Synergy between the coach and client creates momentum.

Better goals are set - ones that naturally pull the client toward the goal rather than goals that require the client to push themselves to the goal.

The client develops new skills, and these skills translate into more success.

Why is coaching becoming so popular?

Coaching is becoming popular for several reasons:

1. Many people are tired of doing what they "should" do and are ready to do something special and meaningful for the rest of their lives. Problem is, many can't see it, or if they can, they can't see a way to reorient their life around it. A coach can help them do both.

2. People are realizing how simple it can be to accomplish something that several years ago might have felt out of reach or like a pipedream. A coach is not a miracle worker (well, they are, sometimes) but a coach does have a large tool kit to help the Big Idea become a Reality. Fortunately, people now have time and resources to invest in themselves in this kind of growth.

3. Spirituality. If you've tracked the phenomenal success of James Redfield's Celestine Prophecy on the NY Times best-seller list during 1994, you get a sense of just how many people are willing to look at, and consider, the notion of spirituality. Wow. Many coaches are spiritually based -- even the ones who coach IBM and AT&T. America is getting spiritual quickly. (Our working definition of spirituality? "How connected you are with yourself and others.") The coach helps the clients to tune in better to themselves and others.

Some context about coaching . . .
A personal coach does just what an athletic coach or music teacher does, only in a more complete and bigger way. A coach challenges you and takes the time to find out what winning in life means to you. A coach is your partner in living the life you know you can accomplish, personally and professionally. A coach is someone to hold you accountable for your life, to make sure you really do live up to your potential.

No matter where you are in life, there is always a desire for more. More success, more money, closer relationships, a deeper feeling of meaning in life, to be of greater service in the world. It is the nature of people to want to attain more, become more, be more, and we all struggle with how to get what we're looking for.

Most people believe that "hard work and doing it on your own" are the keys to finding the life, success, money, or happiness that they seek. They believe that a price must be paid to attain what they want, and often that price is poor health, not having enough time to enjoy life, strained family relationships or lessened productivity. The saddest part is that, even though this effort may result in more of something, it is often not the something you had in mind, and you are back where you started, or worse, further from your real intentions.

Athletes and performers know about this trap. They know they need someone else, someone trained to help them set goals, discover real needs, and work effectively toward ultimate goals of excellence. So, they are willing to hire a coach or a teacher. No serious athlete or musician would expect to progress very far without one.

What about people who are already doing great in their lives. Why would they need a coach?

They might not need a coach. But it is helpful to find out: Are they doing what they most enjoy? Are they tolerating anything? Is life easy? Are they going to be financially independent within the next 15 years? Do they have what they most want? We've discovered that, often, people need to expect more out of their lives. A coach can help in this process

This information courtesy of International Coach Federation: www.coachfederation.org