Executive coaching

---

The International Coaching Federation has provided one clear definition of coaching:

“Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential.”

Coaching and mentoring are often considered to sit on a continuum.

Both are concerned with personal and professional development, but the amount of input by the coach-mentor increases as one moves along this continuum towards pure mentoring.

Coaching allows a client (often referred to as a coachee), to identify whatever it is that they want to achieve and then have a facilitated conversation that helps them work towards their own particular goal or objective. As the coach I’m there to help develop their reflective thinking skills and to provide appropriate prompts, to help them achieve what they want.

Like most professional coaches, I use well-structured processes and well tested models and tools, to help the coachee work towards the specific goal or objective that they have selected for themselves. If I’m doing a great job, then these tools and processes will be largely invisible to the coachee – you shouldn’t feel like you are being processed!

What you are looking to achieve is up to you as the coachee to define. My role as the coach is to help you get there. But coachees often find that through coaching they have developed greater self-awareness and that their emotional intelligence (which can support empathy, collaboration, communication and leadership), is enhanced. Being clear about defining their own goals and having a clear plan on how to achieve those goals, also comes from participating in coaching.

A typical bundle of sessions for a coaching client to achieve what they want, would be 4 to 6 sessions and with each session being around 60 minutes long. The sessions would typically be about 2-3 weeks apart, which gives good time for the coachee to reflect and think and sometimes do a bit of homework (notes and ideas that might help them move towards their goal). But the number of sessions, session length and the scheduling, will be agreed to suit the individual client and what it is that they want to achieve.

In our connected post-pandemic world, most of the coaching I do these days is online, using Teams, Zoom, or GoogleMeet style platforms. So not different really to how an awful lot of business is now conducted. Online sessions generally work well for coachees, removing the complications of travel and meeting location co-ordination. That said, if meeting face to face is going to work better for you, then we can discuss how we might do this.

I always begin a new coaching engagement with a free 30 min intro session. This is a chance for both of us to get to know each other a little, make sure that the fit is right, and ask initial key questions. If everything feels correct and appropriate, then we can do the diary-management piece and plan a convenient time for the first full coaching session.