A question I get asked a lot and, up until a few years ago, I would have been asking it myself. My own coaching journey happened quite by accident when my sister suggested me as a practice coachee to someone who was training to be a coach. “What is coaching anyway?” I asked. When she told me it’ll help me be more productive, could help me gain some clarity on which direction I wanted to take my career and support me to take control of the areas of my life I was unsatisfied with, I was sold! Nothing to lose, right?
I had no idea how right I was! Working with a coach was a life changing journey for me - in two ways. I found that I could form new habits and leave the old ones that didn’t serve me behind. I found myself more productive, procrastinating less, getting things done and going for things I’d been afraid to go for. My coach was a great listener and asked me insightful thinking questions, allowing me to talk things through until I came up with the answers myself... and that part felt so empowering! I decided what I would do. I committed to the actions and then the next week I was accountable to my coach when she asked, “How did you get on with the tasks you set yourself?” I became more self aware, I felt empowered and my personal growth was at an all time high.
Secondly, it was life changing because when my coaching sessions came to an end, I decided I wanted to make people feel like my coach had made me feel and, shortly afterwards, I signed up for training.
So what is it? To me, coaching is a time of strong personal growth and positive change, where you are focused on achieving specific goals by putting in place small, actionable steps, each one designed to get you closer to the goal. In the coaching world, you hear the term "maximise your potential" a lot and I love this. The potential to achieve what success means to us is in all of us. A coach will facilitate this process, supporting you and empowering you on the journey. Sometimes we know there is an area of our lives that we want to change but we aren't quite sure what that change is. Talking through this with a coach, who will listen and then ask you powerful thinking questions, helping you see things from a new perspective and helping you define your goals (some you may not have known you even had) makes for an exciting partnership.
As humans, we engage in self-limiting talk which leads to self-limiting beliefs - we end up saying it so much to ourselves that we begin to believe it. I've been there myself so I know exactly what that inner critic sounds like. "I'll never achieve that, there's no point in trying." "I won't get the job, I'm not as good as the other candidates." "I'm not confident enough." This is where coaching can be transformational. When you sift through the self-limiting beliefs you are telling yourself, your coach will turn it around, maybe ask you what you can do in the job role you are going for, how beneficial you can be to the company, until you realise your list of pros far outweighs your list of cons. Sometimes goals appear that you never even knew you had, and I will coach on those, too. Suddenly, you are a person of action and possibility, positively looking forward and leaving the inner critic and self-limiting chatter behind.
A coach will support you through this process of change and work with you to form new habits, so when the coaching journey eventually comes to an end, the old habits have been forgotten and the new habits you worked together to form are now exactly that... habits. When this happens, you don't need that person to be accountable to any more, and you can now face new challenges yourself, from a place of positivity and with an attitude of "Yes, I can!"
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