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Will coaching be your vitamin or your Advil?

Written by Blaire Fernandez 

We all have our individual paths in life — complete with our own passions, ambitions, and circumstances. Piggybacking on our last post “coaching is the new exercising” we believe that coaching is here to stay. The question is not whether you’ll engage in coaching, it’s how?

The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Coaches honor the client as the expert in his or her life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful, and whole. Standing on this foundation, the coach’s responsibility is to:

• Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve
• Encourage client self-discovery
• Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
• Hold the client responsible and accountable
• This process helps clients dramatically improve their outlook on work and life while improving their leadership skills and unlocking their potential.

How it works:

You’ll meet with your coach for 50 minutes twice a month and will likely have “thought work” to do between sessions. Typically, a six-month engagement allows clients to feel the profound impact that coaching has to offer, and you’ll notice a transformation of thought and of your life trajectory by the end of that time.

 For some of us, coaching will become our daily vitamin. We’ll cling to the relationship we’ve built with our coach for years in order to ensure we stay engaged in being who we want to be and remain focused on taking the steps required to achieve what we want to become. For these folks, coaching gives us consistent and small nudges throughout our lives to ensure we keep on course.

For others, coaching will be more like the occasional Advil to handle the acute issue that presents itself. Ideally, we’ll be able to call on a coach with whom we’ve established a relationship and work through the current challenge. In either case, one of the most important elements to ensure success in a coaching engagement is chemistry. That way, whether you treat the coaching relationship as a vitamin or as an Advil, you’ll know you’ve got someone on the other end of the line who’s in sync with you and understands how to coach you to your best.