"transforming potential into success"

FAQs

What is Coaching?

Coaching is a process where you have a mentor, manager, trainer and friend all rolled into one person to help you identify goals, break them down into achievable chunks, and to keep you moving along the path to achieving them.

Coaching is an ongoing professional relationship that helps people produce extraordinary results in their lives, careers, businesses or organizations.

The ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.

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. The coach's job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client has already.

ICF credentialed coaches recognise that results are a matter of the client’s intentions, choices and actions, supported by the coach’s efforts and application of the coaching process.

How Long Does Coaching Take?

The coaching relationship lasts as until the individual has reached his/her clearly expressed goals. These will have been agreed at the initial coaching meeting.

During this time your coach helps you to identify and set goals, adapts your personal beliefs to meet your goals, clears potential blocks and ensures that your values are aligned with your short and long term outcomes.

coaching4success clients often begin with a three month coaching program, which consists of six fortnightly sessions, each of 50 minutes duration.

Is Coaching the Same as Counselling?

No. The focus of counseling is on the person’s past. It is a process that deals with healing emotional pain or conflict within an individual or in a relationship between two people. Counseling aims to assist recovery from traumatic events or undesirable behaviors.

Whereas coaching focuses on a person’s present, in order to help them create actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one’s personal and work life and act towards the future. The emphasis in a coaching relationship is on action and accountability. A highly experienced coach will know when to look at the past because it informs the present, as well as in order to help distinguish limiting belief systems.

What Training has my Coach had?

All coaching4success coaches are credentialed with the International Coach Federation (ICF).

Coaches who has been credentialed by the International Coach Federation have met ICF's stringent requirements of coaching. An ICF credentialed coach has received very specific coach training, has achieved a designated number of experience hours and has been coached by a mentor coach.

An ICF credentialed coach abides by a strict set of ethics.

How does coaching work?

Coaching can be done in many ways – in person or on the telephone. The coach works in partnership with you to create your future. coaching4success has found that coaching by telephone works well for busy clients because it also wither the coach or the client to live, work or travel anywhere in the world. As a result, there is no interruption in the coaching call schedule.

At coaching4success we work with our clients individually and in groups. When coaching our clients individually, we work together once every two weeks for 50 minutes each session. As a client, you bring an agenda of items to the call. As your coach, we help you to solve the problems and make the most of the opportunities. When you are taking on a large goal, we help you design the project and provide support and structure needed to make sure it gets done. We bring out your best by offering advice, expecting a lot, helping you strategise and celebrating the wins.

Why does Coaching Work?

In professional sports, great athletes have coaches to guide their progress, support their success and identify and improve upon any weaknesses. Today, business leaders and their organisations are hiring coaches to keep their winning edges.

Coaching works because it is a dynamic and interactive relationship that helps you reach your goals. You and your coach become a team, focusing on your goals and needs to accomplish more than you would alone. A coaching relationship encourages you to make changes, improve your skills and take specific action steps. With a coach, you take more actions, think bigger and get the job done, thanks to the accountability that your coach provides. As a result, you reach your big goals faster. Your coach knows how to help you make better decisions, set the best goals, and integrate your professional and personal life for maximum productivity.

Many clients value the perspective of someone outside their organisaition, and appreciate receiving honest and truthful advice untainted by corporate politics or hidden agendas. And some clients look for the benefit of industry knowledge, professional experience or a broad range of resources.

Returning to the professional sports analogy, most winning sport teams say they perhaps could have been good, but not the best, without the support, strategies, encouragement, insights, accountability and, yes, the ‘push’ they received from their coaches.

Success in any venture is achieved more easily when you have someone working along side you assisting, pointing the way, giving honest and encouraging feedback and cheering you along the way.

What are some reasons for working with a Coach?

A coach provides a sounding board for new ideas and better decisions.

A coach gives you honest and unconditional support.

A coach will help you set the goals you truly want and help you achieve them.

A coach integrates your professional and personal life and makes sure that the goals are balanced and you achieve fulfillment.

A coach helps you gain greater clarity of vision than you can alone.

A coach focuses on the big picture not just parts of it. Coaching is holistic.

A coach helps make sure you are taking smart actions and being as effective as possible.

Is Coaching is more effective than training?

Research is available (Fran Finn) to prove that after one year of coaching for executives these leaders outperformed the leaders who simply received training on 4 out of 5 measures. The research, measurement and feedback was based on a model of transformational leadership.

What is Facilitation?

Facilitation is helping a group to accomplish its goals. There are a wide range of perspectives about the ideal nature and values of facilitation, much as there are a wide range of perspectives about the ideal nature and values of leadership. For example, some facilitators may believe that facilitation should always be highly democratic in nature and that anything other than democratic is not facilitation at all. Others may believe that facilitation can be quite directive, particularly depending on the particular stage of development of the group.

Whatever one's beliefs about the best nature of facilitation, the practice usually is best carried out by someone who has strong knowledge and skills regarding group dynamics and processes - these are often referred to as process skills. Effective facilitation might also involve strong knowledge and skills about the particular topic or content that the group is addressing in order to reach its goals -- these are often referred to as content skills.

What is the role of a Facilitator?

The role of the facilitator is to ensure that the group works as a constructive and cohesive unit. The facilitator aims:
• To encourage constructive debate between group members

• To bring out information from introverted members of the group and to allow new ideas to be submitted

• To maintain order of the group discussion, discouraging participants from talking at the same time, or dominating the floor

• To ensure that all contributions to the discussion are treated equally and that no-one is rebuffed for their input

• To control problem people within the group allowing everyone to participate freely

• To adhere to the meeting timetable thus ensuring completion of the agenda


• To take a detached look at the discussion viewing each point on its merits

• To promote discussion of each point raised, by all members of the group