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• How Does Our Coaching Work?

Coaching

Coaching is a tool to effect change in people and organizations.

The coaching relationship is unique because it requires special skills on the part of the coaching partner to support the individual to reach his or her goals. We take great pride in our responsibility to build and maintain these special relationships, and have a world-class roster of experienced, dedicated, and highly educated coaches across Canada, the United States and Europe.

The word Coach has been watered down over the years and is now used to represent a diverse set of job roles or functions that would not qualify under the criteria of a Professional Coach. Coaching differs from other service professions that provide personal or organizational support.

Professional coaching is a distinct set of competencies and disciplines focused on an individual's life as it relates to goal setting, outcome creation and personal change management. The primary focus of coaching is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one's work or personal life. Coaching is a profession supporting growth and development, based on individual-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes, which are linked to success. Coaching is forward-moving and future-focused, with emphasis on action, accountability, and follow-through.

Coaching is NOT Therapy, which tends to deal with pain or dysfunction by focusing on past or present elements in the client’s life that need reframing.  Outcomes of therapy tend to be centred on a more positive emotional/feeling state (although positive feelings/emotions may also be a happy side-effect to reaching the goals you identified with your coach). Therapy often focuses on resolving difficulties arising from the past, which impair an individual's emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with present life circumstances in more emotionally healthy ways.

Coaching is also NOT Consulting, which usually entails bringing in an expert to help fix a particular problem, often with the assumption the consultant will diagnose the problem and prescribe (and possibly implement) solutions.

In general, the assumption with coaching is that people are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.