... allows you and your team to thoughtfully approach and overcome immediate obstacles while also strengthening your ability to take on new habits and patterns
beneficial to satisfaction and success at work!
As coaches, we are neutral, process-focused, and results-oriented to support the client in meeting their goals.
We focus on awareness, action, and accountability to guarantee that the client makes progress in understanding and overcoming immediate obstacles while also improving their ability to take on future challenges.
One-Time Sessions * Long-Term Engagements
Coaching For Transitions * Coaching for New Teams
Why invest in a coach?
Support Team Members' Success
Coaches provide the support that colleagues, supervisors, and mentors often cannot; they slow down to listen and dig deeper into an individual's thoughts and challenges, from a vantage point that is both neutral and focuses on the individual. This support shows the individual that the organization cares about not only their performance but also their development and happiness.
Coaches contribute the supportive listening, the deep reflection, and the appropriate tools the client needs to move forward, not only on a single issue but also on a larger and more meaningful change or mindset shift. The client gains both awareness and a readiness to act on the agency that they have to make change for the better. The client will move from turning in reflective circles or being "stuck" to moving forward in a way that balances action and reflection to achieve better outcomes and greater satisfaction.
Change Thinking to Achieve Goals
This opportunity to explore and change their thinking for the better can have profound results - - and even to rewire the brain's neural pathways to be more effective:
"By changing our thinking, we can change the neural pathways in the brain, creating new ways of seeing and interacting with the world. As coaches, we use tools and techniques that promote neuroplasticity. By thinking about our thinking (also called metacognition) we can create new feedback loops for deeply ingrained beliefs that trigger responses, which trigger feelings that lead into action or avoidance…
When clients tend to a way of thinking during the coaching process and choose new behaviors and practices often enough, new neural networks are formed, the landscape of the brain is changed, and once difficult practices now become easy habits… The pitfall many people fall into when setting goals is jumping right into the "Action" stage. Without spending some time gaining awareness, clarity, and exploring choices, actions are often dead in the water before we even start, because we haven't rewired our brains to support us in our goals."
"How Coaching Really Works (And How To Make The Most Of It)", by Kristin Constable, in Forbes Magazine (13 March 2017)
What does coaching look like?
The Coaching Relationship
I see coaching as the co-creation of insights and the activation of agency through a collaborative conversation between coach and client. The client, like all individuals, is a whole, creative, and resourceful being, so my role as a coach is to provide process support to the client to help them best leverage these to meet their goals. The Center for Creative Leadership's "Handbook of Coaching in Organizations" describes the coach/client relationship as, "[a] helping relationship with a developmental focus played out in conversations that stimulate the person or group being coached to greater awareness, deeper and broader thought, and wiser decisions and actions".
A Coaching Session
Each coaching session is driven by the client and their goals; it begins with the client setting their goals for the session, and then identifying ways that we'll know we've made progress toward these goals by the end of the session. My vision of coaching is one in which I guide a client through a process toward their goals, while actively learning and opening doors, instead of assuming and leading down hallways.
Coaching for Work
I offer organizational coaching, so coaching that's related to work - from team dynamics at work to challenges with your own goals to shifts or major changes in your work or career, and so on. I think the "work/life" dichotomy is false, so there's likely to be spillover between the two. The types of subjects that would be out of bounds of this coaching would be ones that are purely personal and have no relation at all to your work career, professional life.
Coaching Formats
I work with individuals, groups (individuals with separate goals), and teams (individuals with common or interrelated goals and work). Coaching engagements with an individual client or group can range from one to a series of sessions. Coaching in organizations can start with individual coaching sessions for team members and grow to team coaching sessions, workshops, and integrated support.
What happens without a coach?
When we are left to our own thinking, we will likely stay "stuck" on many different elements at work. We will not take action to improve our situations, from technical to relational, and we will continue to stress and underperform at work. As individuals and teams, we will continue to identify issues but we will not be able to change the habits that lead to these issues. Colleagues may leave the organization because they feel frustrated and unsupported.
The ongoing efforts within your organization will not pay their dividends, costing the team satisfaction, success, and forward movement.
Invest in the satisfaction and success of your team members by engaging a coach!