1. What process do you use to work with your clients?

2. Do you require a minimum commitment?

3. What is your experience?

4. What are your fees?

1. What process do you use to work with your clients?

Individuals interested in exploring whether coaching will work for their specific situation are encouraged to set up a private complimentary consultation. You may do so by contacting me via email or phone. Prior to the consultation you will receive an exploratory form which will allow us to focus most effectively on your most important issues during our hour together. In addition to discussing your coaching needs, you will have the opportunity to ask me questions and get a feel for my personal coaching style.

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2. Do you require a minimum commitment?

No. As the client, you decide how long you would like to reap the benefits of working with a professional coach. Many coaches require a minimum 3-6 month commitment, but I believe that some issues can be handled much more quickly than three months. On the other hand, other, more deep-rooted challenges may take longer to resolve --think of an onion—we keep peeling away layer after layer until we get to the core and the challenge is resolved! I work with my clients on a month-to-month basis.

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5. What is your experience?

I have been a college professor of communication since 1996. During that time, I have helped hundreds of adults gain skills in all areas of communication, including interpersonal communication and professional communication. I have been a highly sought-after instructor with much positive feedback from my students. The skills I have taught my students include empathic and informational listening, relationship development, using non-verbal communication successfully in relationships, managing and resolving conflict, and how to best present their messages to an audience. You are welcome to read my professional and personal biographies. I established Transformative Journeys Life Coaching in 2006 to allow me to use my expertise by tailoring the application of these principles to meet the needs of adults outside of the college setting. My professional background and education have grounded me in the necessary skills required that led me to my establishing a formalized coaching practice.

6. What are your fees?

Click here to view my current fee schedule for individual coaching.

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1. What Is Coaching?

Professional Coaching is a professional partnership between a qualified coach and an individual or team that supports the achievement of extraordinary results, based on goals set by the individual or team. Through the process of coaching, individuals focus on the skills and actions needed to successfully produce their personally relevant results.

The individual or team chooses the focus of conversation, while the coach listens and contributes observations and questions as well as concepts and principles which can assist in generating possibilities and identifying actions. Through the coaching process the clarity that is needed to support the most effective actions is achieved. Coaching accelerates the individual's or team’s progress by providing greater focus and awareness of possibilities leading to more effective choices. Coaching concentrates on where individuals are now and what they are willing to do to get where they want to be in the future. Professional coaches recognize that results are a matter of the individual's or team’s intentions, choices and actions, supported by the coach's efforts and application of coaching skills, approaches and methods.

2. What are the benefits of coaching?

Individuals who engage in a coaching relationship can expect to experience fresh perspectives on personal challenges and opportunities, enhanced thinking and decision making skills, enhanced interpersonal effectiveness, and increased confidence in carrying out their chosen work and life roles. Consistent with a commitment to enhancing their personal effectiveness, they can also expect to see appreciable results in the areas of productivity, personal satisfaction with life and work, and the achievement of personally relevant goals.

3. How can you determine if coaching is right for you?

To determine if you could benefit from coaching, start by summarizing what you would expect to accomplish in coaching. When someone has a fairly clear idea of the desired outcome, a coaching partnership can be a useful tool for developing a strategy for how to achieve that outcome with greater ease.
Since coaching is a partnership, also ask yourself if you find it valuable to collaborate, to have another viewpoint and to be asked to consider new perspectives. Also, ask yourself if you are ready to devote the time and the energy to making real changes in your work or life. If the answer to these questions is yes, then coaching may be a beneficial way for you to grow and develop.
You can also take the quiz: Am I Coachable?

4. How is coaching distinct from other service professions?

Professional coaching is a distinct service which focuses on an individual’s life as it relates to goal setting, outcome creation and personal change management. In an effort to understand what a coach is, it can be helpful to distinguish coaching from other professions that provide personal or organizational support.

• Therapy. Coaching can be distinguished from therapy in a number of ways. First, coaching is a profession that supports personal and professional growth and development based on individual-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is forward moving and future focused. Therapy, on the other hand, deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or a relationship between two or more individuals. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past which hamper an individual's emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with present life and work circumstances in more emotionally healthy ways. Therapy outcomes often include improved emotional/feeling states. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one's work or personal life. The emphasis in a coaching relationship is on action, accountability and follow through.

• Consulting. Consultants may be retained by individuals or organizations for the purpose of accessing specialized expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, there is often an assumption that the consultant diagnoses problems and prescribes and sometimes implements solutions. In general, the assumption with coaching is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.

• Mentoring. Mentoring, which can be thought of as guiding from one’s own experience or sharing of experience in a specific area of industry or career development, is sometimes confused with coaching. Although some coaches provide mentoring as part of their coaching, such as in mentor coaching new coaches, coaches are not typically mentors to those they coach.

• Training. Training programs are based on the acquisition of certain learning objectives as set out by the trainer or instructor. Though objectives are clarified in the coaching process, they are set by the individual or team being coached with guidance provided by the coach. Training also assumes a linear learning path which coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear without a set curriculum plan.

• Athletic Development. Though sports metaphors are often used, professional coaching is different from the traditional sports coach. The athletic coach is often seen as an expert who guides and directs the behavior of individuals or teams based on his or her greater experience and knowledge. Professional coaches possess these qualities, but it is the experience and knowledge of the individual or team that determines the direction. Additionally, professional coaching, unlike athletic development, does not focus on behaviors that are being executed poorly or incorrectly. Instead, the focus is on identifying opportunity for development based on individual strengths and capabilities.

5. What should someone look for when selecting a coach?

The most important thing to look for in selecting a coach is someone with whom you feel you can easily relate create and the most powerful partnership. Here are some questions you may want to ask prospective coaches:

• What specialized skills or experience do you bring to your coaching?
• What is your philosophy about coaching?
• What is your specific process for coaching? (how sessions are conducted, frequency, etc.)
• What are some coaching success stories? (specific examples of individuals who have done well and examples of how you have added value)

6. How do you ensure a compatible partnership?

Overall, be prepared to design the coaching partnership with the coach. For example, think of a strong partnership that you currently have in your work or life. Look at how you built that relationship and what is important to you about partnership. You will want to build those same things into a coaching relationship. Here are a few other tips:

• Have a personal interview with one or more coaches to determine “what feels right” in terms of the chemistry. Coaches are accustomed to being interviewed, and there is generally no charge for an introductory conversation of this type.
• Look for stylistic similarities and differences between the coach and you and how these might support your growth as an individual or the growth of your team.
• Discuss your goals for coaching within the context of the coach’s specialty or the coach’s preferred way of working with a individual or team.
• Talk with the coach about what to do if you ever feel things are not going well; make some agreements up front on how to handle questions or problems.
• Remember that coaching is a partnership, so be assertive about talking with the coach about anything that is of concern at any time.

7. Within the partnership, what does the coach do? The individual?

The role of the coach is to provide objective assessment and observations that foster the individual’s or team members’ enhanced self-awareness and awareness of others, practice astute listening in order to garner a full understanding of the individual’s or team’s circumstances, be a sounding board in support of possibility thinking and thoughtful planning and decision making, champion opportunities and potential, encourage stretch and challenge commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations, foster the shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives, challenge blind spots in order to illuminate new possibilities, and support the creation of alternative scenarios. Finally, the coach maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession’s code of ethics.

The role of the individual or team is to create the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful coaching goals, utilize assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others, envision personal and/or organizational success, assume full responsibility for personal decisions and actions, utilize the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives, take courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations, engage big picture thinking and problem solving skills, and utilize the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by the coach to engage effective forward actions.

What does coaching ask of an individual?

To be successful, coaching asks certain things of the individual, all of which begin with intention….

• Focus—on one’s self, the tough questions, the hard truths--and one’s success
• Observation—the behaviors and communications of others
• Listening—to one’s intuition, assumptions, judgments, and to the way one sounds when one speaks
• Self discipline—to challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and to develop new ones which serve one’s goals in a superior way
• Style—leveraging personal strengths and overcoming limitations in order to develop a winning style
• Decisive actions—however uncomfortable, and in spite of personal insecurities, in order to reach for the extraordinary
• Compassion—for one’s self as he or she experiments with new behaviors, experiences setbacks—and for others as they do the same
• Humor—committing to not take one’s self so seriously, using humor to lighten and brighten any situation
• Personal control—maintaining composure in the face of disappointment and unmet expectations, avoiding emotional reactivity
• Courage—to reach for more than before, to shift out of being fear based in to being in abundance as a core strategy for success, to engage in continual self examination, to overcome internal and external obstacles

8. How can the success of the coaching process be measured?

Measurement may be thought of in two distinct ways. First, there are the external indicators of performance: measures which can be seen and measured in the individual’s or team’s environment. Second, there are internal indicators of success: measures which are inherent within the individual or team members being coached and can be measured by the individual or team being coached with the support of the coach. Ideally, both external and internal metrics are incorporated.

Examples of external measures include achievement of coaching goals established at the outset of the coaching relationship, increased income/revenue, obtaining a promotion, performance feedback which is obtained from a sample of the individual’s constituents (e.g., direct reports, colleagues, customers, boss, the manager him/herself), personal and/or business performance data (e.g., productivity, efficiency measures). The external measures selected should ideally be things the individual is already measuring and are things the individual has some ability to directly influence.

Examples of internal measures include self-scoring/self-validating assessments that can be administered initially and at regular intervals in the coaching process, changes in the individual’s self-awareness and awareness of others, shifts in thinking which inform more effective actions, and shifts in one’s emotional state which inspire confidence.