Is coaching the best support for you?

Making the decision to invest time, energy and money into coaching isn’t one to make impulsively. Every client I have worked with over the past five years has been on a journey; whilst my conversation with them may have been my first interaction with them, every one of them has been watching, reading and reflecting for a while before we spoke. So, if you are on the fence right now, I wanted to give you a bit of insight into the “behind the scenes” of coaching, to help you decide if coaching is the best support for you.

I am making the assumption that you have already decided the direction you want to go in; you have considered the difference between coaching, mentoring, consulting and training. You’ve realised that you don’t want recommendations and instruction, you want someone to support you in uncovering more about yourself. If that is new to you, maybe you need a quick break and to read this blog that can tell you more.  Ultimately, you know the results that you want from this investment.

Whilst EVERYONE can benefit from coaching, your personality, learning style and view of the world will always influence your experience; that is the joy of this personal development!  Every person I work with gets similar tools and structure, such as personality profiling, values work and goals setting. Yet WHO they are impacts the journey they are taken on.  Each person has a different desire to be, to have and to do; their experience is as unique as they are.

Coaching is a two-way process; like sports coaching, progress can’t happen unless the coachee learns, reflects and commits. When I look back at the clients that have the most success, who make the biggest shift in their work-life balance and creation of a career to enjoy, COMMITMENT is a consistent theme. Showing up, booking in sessions at a regular interval and preparing.  I have reflected on this myself, and considered these elements as being essential to being coachable:

• Open-Minded
• Responsible
• Inquisitive
• Self-motivated

This is echoed when you take a quick step into the world of academic coaching research. Those that are open to trying new things and are curious have been found to make significant progress when they are coached.

There is often a stigma attached to coaching; the worry that you will be judged, seen to be weak or need to be fixed, can lead to people holding off from asking for support. Ironically, research has found that those who benefit from coaching often have low confidence, work hard to avoid failure (rather than reach goals) or hide their perceived lack of ability and rate themselves poorly. Imposter Syndrome, anyone?  These traits are often the things that stop people from asking for help; yet their desire to reflect, open-mindedness, ability to learn and critical eye mean they respond really well to coaching. Such a dilemma!
So, if you are in a position where you want to make some changes in your life, but you aren’t sure what you need next, let me help.
Start with asking yourself:

1. Am I prepared to focus on myself for at least one hour a week?
2. Am I prepared to be uncomfortable and honest?
3. Am I excited about what I may uncover?
4. Do I believe that I can change?
5. Do I want to learn?

What answers are we looking for; they need to be a MAYBE at the very least; ideally, it’s an OH YES! Coaching is not a fix-all; it’s a journey where you are guided by someone who believes that YES is a simple answer to these questions.  So, if you are asking yourself the questions “Is coaching the best support for me?” I hope that you can see that the answer is a hearty YES!

Before you go, I wanted to hand over to one of my Career Coaching clients, who is going to share with you their answer to my question “What was coaching like for you?”

“I approached you for coaching because we’d worked together a few years ago (when you were recommended to me by a mutual colleague for coaching/advice around making a career transition). I was at a really low point career-wise because the organisation I work for had undergone some reorganisation and I had moved into a new role in a newly formed team and it wasn’t working out for me. I felt tired and anxious, frustrated, and undervalued. I wasn’t sleeping well and the stresses of the pandemic lockdown and juggling home-school alongside a job that was making me feel unwell had reached a tipping point. I knew I needed to make a change, so I booked 7 weeks off work (part annual leave, part unpaid parental leave) over the school summer holidays and I promised myself I’d focus some of that time on developing a get-out plan.

I was a bit nervous about coaching because I wasn’t sure what I was really asking for help with, and I didn’t want to look like a failure since our previous coaching sessions. But after the initial conversation about what type of support I was looking for and how many sessions I wanted to book, I felt much better. I also felt happy knowing we would do all the sessions on Zoom or by phone, because then it was easy to fit in around childcare.

I enjoyed having the time carved out to focus on myself because I knew I needed to make a change. My health would have suffered if I had tried to soldier-on in a job that wasn’t right for me, and the coaching really helped me to work out what was wrong and how to fix it. My objective was to get a new job, so all our sessions were around identifying my values and strengths and how to leverage those to find new opportunities. The most useful bit was the personality profiling tool, which showed that my job was requiring me to work in a way that was completely the opposite of my preferred approach – no wonder it was stressing me out!

I do like a bit of self-reflection and have, over the past few years, dabbled in journaling and morning pages as well as reading books like ’Thrive’ and ’Stepping Up’. But it was challenging to carve out time to do my homework and to really ask myself tricky questions, like ‘what is it that I bring to the organisation’ without being too vague about my strengths and unique skills. 

I paid for the coaching out of my own pocket (rather than through work) but I consider it money well spent. We had four sessions and within six months, I had a new job to go to. The new job is great – much better suited to my skills, experience, values and approach – and I’m really glad that I took the time to ask for help through coaching.”

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