What is Coaching?

Professional Coaching is an ongoing partnership that helps clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Through the process of coaching, clients deepen their learning, improve their performance, and enhance their quality of life.

In each meeting, the client chooses the focus of conversation, while the coach listens and contributes observations and questions. This interaction creates clarity and moves the client into action. Coaching accelerates the client’s progress by providing greater focus and awareness of choice. Coaching concentrates on where clients are today and what they are willing to do to get where they want to be tomorrow.

Professional coaches are trained to listen and observe, to customize their approach to the individual client’s needs, and to elicit solutions and strategies from the client. They believe that the client is naturally creative and resourceful and that the coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has. While the coach provides feedback and an objective perspective, the client is responsible for taking the steps to produce the results he or she desires.

People hire a coach when they are starting a new business, making a career transition, reevaluating their life choices, or simply feeling ready for a personal or professional breakthrough.

The ICF estimates that there are currently 10,000 part-time and full- time coaches worldwide. Coaching has been covered extensively in Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, Money, USA Today, Fast Company, New Age Journal, Industry Week, Inc., the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Management Review, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Men’s Health, Bloomberg Personal, Newsday, etc.