Hypnosis is Focus - Lisa Percival/

Personal Coaching

Guidance, Feedback and Support

What is Coaching?

Coaching is the art of enhancing performance, creating potential, or closing the gap between the current situation and the desired situation. Coaching is a process that uses immediate problems as models for developing strategic solutions. Coaching fosters the development of skills for learning. Coaching makes sense of learning by using assessment and feedback. Coaching uses focus to not only set goals that are appropriate, but to maintain the momentum necessary to achieve them.

The Coaching Process

Coaching is a structured process that has a definite cycle, within which is a series of steps. The steps to a coaching cycle are:

	Define the goals. What would you like to do? Where would you like to be?
	Analyze the present position. What is going on right now? Where are you now?
	Explore options to achieving the goals. What can you do to get there?
	Set up an action plan. Which actions will you take and when will you take them?
	Implement the action plan. What are you learning as you take the steps toward the goal?
	Review your progress and get feedback. What have you learned and how can you build upon this learning?

Coaching Brings out Your Potential

By brainstorming, asking questions, setting realistic goals, acting purposefully and receiving feedback, you become more aware of your strengths and target values. By focusing and holding yourself accountable to another person (your coach), you develop your strengths, increase your skills, and gain the confidence to take on new challenges. From this, you acquire learnings that you can then use to model and apply to many other situations.

One other aspect of the benefits of coaching is called the “Hawthorne Effect”. Simply stated, your morale improves when someone shows an interest in you and your welfare. When your morale improves, your performance and productivity improve.

Emotional Intelligence: The Real Key to Success

Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence and Working With Emotional Intelligence, defines emotional intelligence as a set of competencies:

	Self-Awareness: Knowing one’s internal states, preferences and intuitions
	Self-Regulation: Managing one’s internal states, impulses and resources
	Motivation: Emotional tendencies that guide or facilitate reaching goals
	Empathy: Awareness of other’s feelings, needs and concerns
	Social Skills: Adeptness at inducing desirable responses in others

(from Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman; Bantam Books: New York, 2000).

Your academic skills, or lack of them, are not the real reason you do well or do not do well in the world. Even your intellect is not the real reason you succeed in the world, although it may mean that some academic skills come more easily to you than they do to other people. The real reason you succeed or do not succeed in your goals or endeavors is your emotional ability: how you interact with your self and how you interact with others. Your emotional ability also determines how you respond to events and situations over which you have no control. In the end, it is not what happens to you that matters, but how you let it affect you that matters.

Coaching can help you evaluate your emotional intelligence and from there, improve it. The good news is, it is easier than you think. Developing awareness is the first step. Using the coaching process for feedback is vital to developing awareness. Acquiring flexibility in behavior, optimism, and persistence are also important steps. Learning to think in terms of outcomes and action plans is another important step. Coaching can take you all the way there.

Motivation: Push vs. Pull

At various times you will be more or less motivated to perform or to change or transform. This level of motivation will depend upon your perception of your ability, the likelihood of your success, the familiarity of the situation, or the degree of difficulty that you perceive exists. Notice that your motivation is ultimately dependent upon your perception.

Low Motivation Needs a Push

If you perceive that your ability is weak, that the conditions are adverse, that the challenge is very difficult, then your motivation is likely to be low. You may require more of a “push” to get you started. If you need to be pushed, your coach will do more talking, more instruction, providing you quick answers. Pushing is useful when your confidence needs bolstering and support.

High Motivation Gets a Pull

Once you are on your way, feeling more highly motivated, a “pull” technique draws you out, enabling you to find your own answers. You use your coach as a sounding board and bounce ideas and concepts back and forth, receiving feedback. Pulling is useful when you are confident and are ready to move to the next level, to expand beyond your own existing limits.

With a push technique, your coach does most of the talking. With a pull technique, your coach does most of the listening.

Having a personal coach can be a short-term or a long-term engagement, depending on your needs. You can use a coach to help you reach one goal or a series of goals, to effect change in one area or in many areas of your life. Your coach is there as your companion and guide on your journey, however far you choose to travel.