Choosing Your Continuing Professional Development

Choosing what Continued Professional Development (CPD) you should do to ensure you develop yourself appropriately can seem daunting given the number of offerings out there. However, you can make the process easier if you ask yourself a few basic questions such as, “what challenges am I facing in my coaching work?”, “what do clients need that…

How long should a coaching session be?

… and how often should they be held? In Executive Coaching it is more common to have ninety minute sessions spaced out monthly and in Life Coaching this may vary.  However, regardless of whether you are an Executive or Life Coach, the needs of your client and their ability to absorb the outcome of the…

What to do when you don’t like your client

There comes a time for one reason or another when a coach realizes that s/he is finding it hard to like or work with a client.  Sometimes this is due to what is called ‘transference’, where the client mirrors someone from the past that an individual may have had problems with even though the person…

The Purpose of Coaching Questions

Asking good coaching questions is at the heart of effective coaching regardless of coaching model.  It does not matter what type of coaching approach you trained in, all approaches use questions to uncover individual thought processes. Coaching questions aim to uncover, explore, reflect upon and challenge your client’s thought processes. Coaching questions tend to fall into…

Tips for Dealing with Narcissism

Much inspiration can be found with charismatic leaders but their strengths can be their weaknesses and what has an upside also has a downside. Many of the traits which help leaders reach the top of their game, can also be the same traits which lead to their downfall and there have been many examples of…

How Thinking Styles Affect Stress Levels

You are stuck in a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting that can directly affect your chances of clinching a major contract.  You love your job and you really don’t want to lose it.  Which of the following sounds more like you? “This is awful…I’m really stupid…why didn’t I leave more time?…

Coaching Skills Training for Managers – Do They Really Help?

Here’s a question I often hear from managers within organisations: “I am a manager and my company is rolling out a series of coaching skills courses for all their managers.  I am skeptical as my job is to manage and whilst I like to see myself as a supportive manager, I don’t have the time…

Behavioural Contracting – Confidentiality & Feedback

The dilemma when undertaking coaching in organisations is the need for such organisations to have some form of feedback and the need for confidentiality to be maintained with the client. During the contracting process it is important for all parties to agree the feedback and confidentiality agreement. Feedback may not be deemed essential to all…

Measuring Specific Coaching Outcomes

During this stage of the process, the coach helps translate overall objectives into specific behaviours, as in the following examples: ‘You said you would like Peter to communicate more effectively with his team.  What would you notice being different if he was being a more effective communicator?’ ‘How would you know if you were more…

Setting Overall Coaching Objectives

In an ideal world, a joint meeting would take place between the corporate sponsor, the client and the coach to discuss the desired outcome.  You could call this the transparent tripartite agreement stage of contracting.  However, we do not live in an ideal world and such meetings are not always possible.  In these circumstances the…