One to One Coaching, One to One Mentoring

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Coaching Guide - How to choose and use coaching

One to One coaching – how does it work?

Why might you need it?

There are almost as many applications of coaching as there are people. Most commonly it can help when you are:

• Formulating a business, career or personal strategy
• In transition
• Building a new skill
• Resolving a dilemma
• Tackling a challenge
• Experiencing problems with working relationships

[1:1 situational coaching diagram]

Are you experiencing an issue that is holding back your performance and which you are struggling to address alone? If so, coaching may well be able to help.

In a series of conversations with your coach you will explore:

• Your vision, goals and objectives.
• Your current situation and where you want to make changes.
• The options open to you to make those changes.
• The actions you want to take to make the change.
• Your experience and learning from taking action.

In tackling these areas your coach should help you be more:

• Aware of yourself and your impact on others.
• Willing to take responsibility for and able to respond to your situation.
• Outcome focused and able to learn from your own and others’ experience.
• Self-motivated.

A good coach will do this by:

• Listening and giving you their full attention.
• Asking questions through which you can explore your situation.
• Helping you set well-formed outcomes and goals.
• Generating options and asking you to commit to specific actions.
• Reviewing your performance and your learning from undertaking those actions.
• Supporting and challenging your beliefs about yourself and the world.
• Acting as a sounding board.
• Interpreting with you any profiles or feedback from third parties.
• Making suggestions where appropriate
• Identifying and mobilising appropriate resources.
• Sharing their own knowledge and experience.

The Duration of sessions varies widely according to the issue/s that you are seeking to address. In our experience single sessions of much more than 90-120 minutes are difficult for most coaching clients to absorb and concentrate fully upon.

Their Frequency can again vary widely but more often than every four weeks is usually not enough to put actions into practice and more than every eight weeks can mean that too much of each session is spent getting back up to speed.

Number of sessions.

As a general rule it is hard to be confident far enough into the future for more than six sessions to be confidently booked in at a time. Equally, fewer than three is probably not enough in most cases to build up a relationship, get a good understanding of the problem, take action and learn from the exprerience.

Location is usually on one of;

• the client’s premises - which is convenient but carries the risk of distractions and interruptions
• the coaches premises - usually a good environment but less convenient or
• at a ‘neutral’ location - in which case finding an appropriately private place to talk is important.

Wherever you go, it needs to be comfortable, quiet, free of distractions and suitably private.

Let's Talk

The easiest way to understand how we can help, and whether you feel that you could work with us, is to begin with a conversation.

We don't believe in a "hard sell" and often find that people get value out of the exploratory discussion - whether or not we go on to work together.

Please Contact Us – we would love to hear from you.