Coaching and Consultation for Individuals and Organizations
Coaching and Consultation for Individuals and Organizations |
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About Individual Life-Coaching Coaching is a special relationship that provides the recipient with support, direction, and guidance in recognizing and mobilizing his or her own inner wisdom, considerable skills base, and latent personal resources towards the creation and maintenance of a more fulfilled life. This process can be specific to very concrete goals that you clearly define, or it can be a collaborative investigation of the possible directions that interest you with the intention of moving forward on one or more of those. Coaching provides support, direction, and guidance through the stages of change related to life areas or goals that are important and meaningful to you. You are always in the driver's seat regarding the process, with the freedom to renegotiate the agenda and direction of the work at anytime. While the specific format can be tailored to meet your particular needs, most of my coaching occurs on a weekly basis, by telephone, for either half an hour or for 45 minutes, depending on which plan works best for you. If you have questions about the process or the possibilities, the best thing to do is to schedule a free complimentary half-hour call. This will provide you with a live opportunity to get a feel for me as a person, gain a sense of what coaching might be able to do for you, and give you the opportunity to ask any questions you may have about me or the coaching relationship.
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512-585-1170 or frederick@InnerSessions.net. | |||
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A Note about Coaching and Psychotherapy As your Coach, my job is to help you recognize and marshall information and skills that you already have so you can (1) make decisions about what kinds of changes you would like to make, (2) develop a personal 'action plan' to make those changes, (3) implement your action plan and make any necessary behavioral changes, and (4) develop strategies to maintain the changes you have made. I will support, encourage, teach, and help you to stay 'on track' toward your goals. This is coaching. Counseling and psychotherapy, on the other hand, are health care services. The primary focus is to identify, diagnose, and treat nervous and mental disorders. The goals here include alleviating symptoms, understanding the underlying personality dynamics which create those symptoms, changing the dysfunctional behaviors which are the result of those disorders, and helping patients to cope with their psychological problems. Unlike coaching, it is usually reimbursable through health insurance. While I have considerable therapeutic training, and some experience helping persons work through emotional disorders, I currently only provide such services under the auspices of an agency and the careful scrutiny of my supervisor. I may use some counseling skills and tools in helping you to achieve your goals as your coach. However, if it appears that you require individual support to work through recurrent disruptive emotional concerns, I will refer you to a licensed professional who can help you. In some cases, I may require that an individual seek such support for a particular issue or issues before I will enter or continue the coaching relationship.
A Note about Boundaries It is also important to understand that Coaching is a professional relationship. While it may feel at times like a close personal relationship, it is not one that can extend beyond professional boundaries, either during and after our work together. Considerable experience shows that when these boundaries blur, the hard-won benefits gained from the coaching relationship are endangered.
About Organizational Coaching Coaching for an organization can take a number of different forms and may have any number of defined outcomes as the focus. Most often, companies call in a coach in order to either assist their employees in achieving greater productivity or else as a mediator for improved communication across various demarcation lines. In either case, there is generally a period of assessment wherein I will work individually and in small groups with all the parties concerned in order to determine their perceptions regarding problem areas, including their understanding of obstructions to successful interaction, collaboration or production, whether these situations are specific to a particular individual or department, occur between departments or focus areas, or occur between demarcation lines such as levels of management or between management generally and the employees of the company. Often, there are elements of stress in some combination of these areas. After the initial period of assessment, I generalize the findings, including a detailed list of suggestions elicited directly from the staff and management during the assessment interviews. This material is presented along with a proposal for a specfic strategic plan intended to improve the lines of communication and to resolve any underlying issues that may be eroding the functionality of the organization. This presentation usually begins a period of collaboration between all levels of the organization wherein we negotiate an agreed upon strategy, work together to implement it, often revising the design as we find new challenges or are presented with new data. Eventually we have a system in place that has, in effect, been fully assimilated by the organization as a whole, or by significant parts thereof. At this point I often step out of my coach position and assume a consultant role, serving more as an on-call trouble-shooter for any cases or situations that prove stressful or inoperable based on the guidelines of the newly implemented system. Every company is a unique blend of personalities, skills, talents, directions, and intentions. Aligning as many of the parts of the whole such that they are working for a common goal and serving each other maximally can be a very complicated process, but the process has much similarity to working with a distressed couple or family. Much of the practice involves Emotional Intelligence skills and the alignment of the intentions of all the parties involved. Finding the common factors can go a long way to reducing internal tensions and increasing functionality.
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