Individual Coaching
There are a lot of ways to develop yourself personally and professionally – chances are that you’ve experienced most of them. But some questions can’t be solved by acquiring more knowledge or doing another qualification. When the context changes or the ever-present change moves the ground under you once too often, you aren’t always sure whether the questions that you’re solving for are the right questions anymore.
You know that this change presents an opportunity – that’s not just a cliché, it’s your experience of the world so far. But every time you move towards that opportunity it shifts, and the way that you used to problem-solve isn’t working well enough this time. You want to work this through, to be able to see the things that you can’t currently see, to find the answers to the questions that are rattling around your head in the early hours of the morning.
The first question, the “this is what I want to achieve from our coaching together” is rarely the root cause of discomfort. You can keep treating the symptoms, or you can invest in going deeper and investigating the cause. We will interrogate the assumptions and objectives that you bring, and follow those threads one step further than you did on your own – sometimes the trivial thing that is at the forefront of your mind and bugging you more than it should points to a deeper question that needs addressing. We will sit with discomfort – not in a tidy, curated, Instagram-ready way but frankly, honestly and directly. We won’t dodge the hard questions, we’ll dig into why they are hard. And we will do it irreverently, holding the serious topics lightly because that allows us to look just that little bit longer.
It won’t be clean, or linear, or always comfortable – working at the frontier seldom is. But if you’re ready to embrace the discomfort, ready for spikiness and supportiveness in equal measure, and ready to make that next big risky rewarding step – this is the place.
The process
Unless you’re trained as a coach, “coaching” isn’t a very useful description of the work. You aren’t looking for a process or a lot of impressive jargon, you want to leave the sessions feeling differently. That means something different to everyone at various points in your development, so that’s the first thing we understand.
Fit.
This work is about relationships more than anything else. You want someone who will be honest, direct, supportive and challenging – you need to know that I’m in your corner, and understand that sometimes that means naming things you’d rather be left unsaid. There’s a reason you chose to work with me rather than another coach, but we still need to be able to trust each other to allow the work to really stick. By the end of the first conversation you will have a good idea of whether we are a good match, but things change and that’s OK.
Third-Party involvement.
Often your line manager, HR or L&D might be involved in the arrangement – if so then we involve them in the agreement of the goals, any re-calibration and a final review of the progress that has been made. But they don’t get near the work – that’s yours alone.
Discovery.
This is when we understand the question that you are really trying to solve, and what brought you here rather than somewhere else. What do you want to be able to do differently, feel differently or think differently by the end of the work? What are your expectations of me, and what is “in bounds”? This might include using the Hogan Assessments to reveal how you may be perceived by others, identifying your strengths and where they can serve you (or how they damage your reputation when over-played). It also surfaces the motivations, values and preferences that are the foundations of why you do the work, not just what you do and how you do it.
The Work.
I tend to work over an agreed time period rather than a number of sessions – we don’t know how long this work will take, and anyone who says they do is guessing or lying. We will agree a length of time that we believe it will take to get to your agreed goals, but within that time we aren’t restricted to a certain number of sessions. Every person has a different Goldilocks cadence depending on their preferences, current work and life commitments, and the depth of the work – we’ll find what works for you and adjust as we go. Telling you up front that 1 session every 2 weeks for 3 months is the answer might be straightforward, but it’s likely to be straight wrong.
Review.
The work isn’t static – we will regularly review, looking back at where you’ve come from and looking forward to make sure that the destination still holds. The point of this work is that both you and your situation will change, so the work needs to change too – we build that in from the start.
Who am I?
I came to coaching through twenty years of teaching front-line helicopter crews so that they could operate at the highest level, in an environment where excellence is table stakes and you are making the world a better place. In this world, where technical competence is a given, the blockers become internal. The real work focuses on helping high-performing professionals to overcome their unspoken fears, their doubts and self-sabotage to allow them to operate at the level they’re truly capable of.
Working with leaders and high-performers under real pressure has taught me that it is rarely the first thing that people raise as the issue that is really keeping them stuck. The ability to look past the symptoms, to angle the mirror to illuminate the things you would rather we didn't see, to sit with you in the discomfort rather than reaching for the quick solution. These things aren't easy, or always comfortable, but when we hold serious topics with lightness and a dollop of irreverence then it changes something. You can look squarely at the difficult things, and see them for what they are rather than what you feared they might be.
I hold ICF and EMCC accreditation as an executive and team coach. But credentials tell you I'm qualified. They don't tell you whether I'm the right person to be in the room with your particular version of stuck. That's what the first conversation is for.
