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What is coaching? How can it help you in your career?

I hear a lot of people asking what is coaching, how is it different to mentoring or counselling? Coaching is about gaining clarity, getting focus and taking the right action, action that is right for you and nobody else. Its future focused, it doesn't dwell on the past or keep you in the same place for too long.

It’s also about getting new self-awareness and managing that new awareness to get the results you want. As a coach, I help you on that journey. You set the agenda and I ask the questions to help you reach your goal and stretch you. I support and I challenge you. It’s always looking ahead and moving you forward. Counselling on the other hand looks back, it is very different, you may revisit the same place as many times as necessary; while mentoring is about giving the solutions to the client based on a mentor’s experience; how they did it and sharing what worked.

I'm a HR professional and that is my trade, I work with a lot of business and professionals of different shapes and sizes. I like to educate leaders in business on how to bring coaching conversation into every-day management of people as well as use it as a self development programme. While coaching is widely used in the development of Senior Executives, I like to use it across all levels in a business so that it becomes the culture; a way of doing things, a common language spoken by everyone that gets the best out of people; aligns them to their work. Employees become more focused, take ownership and drive their own career success. This leads to greater productivity, more engaged staff and improved retention in the workplace.

I specialize in strengths coaching which takes a deeper dive into the specific profile of individuals and teams of people that has a scientific basis. It offers some hard factual data to the skeptic or non believer to support the coaching session, takes away the abstract. Together in our coaching session, we look at the strengths they are using every day in the business they are in, we look at their unused or unrealized strengths which offer huge potential and opportunity to develop and excel further. What I love about the strengths profile tool I use with my clients, is that we also look at the weaknesses that each individual has; that each of us have. It's then about helping my clients understand that they perform best when using their strengths, six times better according to research. They don't perform well when using their weaknesses, in fact they never will. I ask my clients the question, are these weaknesses really business critical to their role. Do they really need to focus on them? How will this benefit them? The Strengths Profile I work with helps create that holistic self-awareness that is instrumental to personal growth and future success. We leverage the strengths of individuals and teams to get better results. It's a robust tool that can help support them in achieving the success they want in their career.