Coaching
Why coaching?
Coaching helps people to unlock their potential and thrive by making positive and sustainable changes. People seek out coaching for a variety of reasons:
- Feeling stuck
- Dealing with uncertainty
- Seeking clarity
- Increasing well-being
- Desiring change but not sure what
- Changing career
- Lacking confidence
- Facing new and difficult challenges
- Craving personal development
- Wanting to improve their performance
Whether your reason falls into one of these categories or not, coaching could be what you are looking for.
What is coaching?
Making sense of our thoughts, feelings and behaviours isn’t as easy as we think. Sometimes we need space and support to work out what really is important, where to direct our attention and how to plan and implement the changes necessary to achieve our goals. The coaching process provides that space and support.
Coaching is based on positive psychology which is a branch of psychology that focuses on optimising a person’s potential and well-being. Rather than concentrating on problems, coaching takes a solution-focused approach, which means working with the individual’s strengths and resources to reach and achieve the outcomes they want.
There is plenty of evidence showing how coaching improves individuals’ resilience and self-efficacy, as well as levels of engagement, satisfaction and overall performance at work. With the increasing pressures in the nonprofit sector, coaching is a great way to help you, and your team gain clarity and flourish.
The diagram highlights key stages in the coaching process. Awareness acts as a catalyst for the whole process, leading to insights (aha! moments), which give rise to important choices. These choices lead to action(s) which in turn create change. Coaching isn´t a linear process: awareness and insights are constantly being generated and impacting on the choices you make, the actions you take and the changes you create.
The process relies heavily on the relationship between you and the coach. It entails a structured, dynamic conversation that generates insights and uncovers solutions. Change happens when the awareness and insights are distilled into practical actions which you apply outside the sessions.
Coaching isn’t…
- About giving you advice nor telling you what to do. Therefore, if you want someone to give you the answers then you probably need a different professional rather than a coach.
- Therapy, consultancy, or mentoring.
- Focused on the past and what happened there.
– Murray, Campaign Leader, Global Witness, UK