February, 2012 - Inner Firewalking

Is it Okay to Have so Much Freedom?

The following is an excerpt from the book Get Paid For Who You Are.

If you’re like most people, you grew up thinking you’d have to work 40 to 50 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, before you could take time off and play. In addition, you might have learned that work is something you must put up with to earn money and that loving what you do is nice but not a priority.

I hope you’ll start to consider a new possibility — that maybe it’s okay to work a lot less and have a lot more play in your life. In this day and age, you can actually get paid for doing something you really love. Perhaps you’re already seeing that a lifestyle of freedom is possible for you and beginning to feel a growing desire to create it.

What Coaching Isn’t

The following is an excerpt from the CoachStart Manual.

The most obvious point to remember is that coaching is not therapy, counseling, or psychology. In addition, coaching should not be confused with consulting or mentoring — there are subtle differences between each of these interventions. Whilst the coaching process may have originated in the field of psychology and intervention often follows some psychological models, the actual coaching process should not be mistaken for a therapeutic intervention. Some of the differences include:

Mentoring:
The passing on of knowledge, experiences, and skills usually by someone within the company who is older and wiser. Usually more specifically career-oriented information. A mentor has normally achieved the goal themselves, while a coach may not have any experience in the given coaching area.

Consulting:
Often using your own skills to improve a given situation, as opposed to developing the client’s skills to a level that can cope effectively with the situation.

Therapy and counseling:
Tends to focus on feelings related to past events and processing such feelings. Coaching is oriented towards goal setting and encouraging the client to actively move forward. Tony Grant from Sydney University has said: “Therapy is like helping someone with a broken leg to walk again. Coaching is helping them to run the four minute mile”.

The Coaching Market

The following is an excerpt from the CoachStart Manual.

Ten years ago, no one had heard of life, business, or corporate coaching. Today, it is featured in The New York Times, Fortune Magazine, Oprah, and CNN. And still, most of the world’s population has not heard of it. Demand for coaching is expected to continue to grow and may accelerate. What will happen when the first major movie featuring a life coach hits the street? Corporations are jumping on the band wagon: they want to hire corporate coaches, but even greater is their desire to have their managers trained in coaching techniques, and to develop a “coaching culture” within their organization.

There are an estimated 10,000 part-time and full-time coaches worldwide (ref: ICF). The number of people entering the emerging field of personal and business coaching has doubled in size each of the past three years (ref: CoachVille™). Several hundred articles, TV and radio shows have been done in the past three years. Coaching has been written about in Newsweek, Business Week, Fortune, Money, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fast Company, New Age Journal, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, Bloomberg Personal, Newsday, etc.

The number of corporations using coaching is increasing. Fortune magazine has referred to coaching as: “one of the hottest things in human resources” and “a grassroots movement that is spreading in some of the unlikeliest corners of corporate America, including IBM, AT&T, and Kodak.”

Coaching is strongest in the US, followed by the UK, Japan, Canada, Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand. Coaching is reaching more and more countries all the time; my newsletter subscribers now come from more than 90 countries.

Improvements in technology including teleconferences, cheap international phone calls, and the reach of the internet are making it even easier for coaches to build a successful practice with low overhead.

Ginger Cockerham on Dealing With Challenging Coaching Situations

The following is taken from David’s interview with Ginger Cockerham in 10 Super Coaches.

What if a client brings up a serious life problem – and I don’t have a clue about how to help her/him?

I learned to distinguish between coaching and therapy and referred clients quickly who needed therapy. With the rest of my clients, I recognized that it was not my job to solve my client’s problems – it was my job to be their coach and support and encourage them as they discovered their own solutions.

How can I possibly convince a company that coaching will impact the culture and the bottom line with no established research to substantiate that?

I did pilot programs that would provide results substantiated by their internal records.

Mike Turner On Building a Life Coaching Practice

The following is taken from David’s interview with Mike Turner in 10 Super Coaches.

What was the most disheartening for you while building your practice?

What was most disheartening was not getting enough clients – and wondering if I should persevere or go back to being a consultant. I coped with this by working my fairly small network more and by seeking out a couple of organizations which were active in the coaching field and trying to develop affiliate relationships with them.

Although my early attempts to develop such relationships didn’t lead to any work, spending time developing the relationships did mean I was around people who were active as coaches and this sustained my confidence that my work would eventually expand – as it eventually did.

What was the most interesting or exciting thing for you about building your practice?

The point at which I realized that my practice was self-sustaining and that I no longer felt a day to day anxiety about whether I would be able to pay the bills that month!

Archive

Monthly Archive for February, 2012

Is it Okay to Have so Much Freedom?

Ginger Cockerham on Dealing With Challenging Coaching Situations

Mike Turner On Building a Life Coaching Practice

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