Julie's empowerment workshops and personal mentoring have helped hundreds of women take dramatic steps forward in their lives to experience intense freedom, happiness, and sense of purpose. Find out if she is the right coach for you.
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The word coaching is synonymous with sports teams. A coach can help athletes to develop the mindset to achieve, to set and achieve goals that to many people seem insurmountable, but with focus and clarity, can be met or exceeded. They can help a sportsperson to reach their full potential by planning structured training programmes, providing feedback on performance, and helping them to become more effective.
However, coaching has become more prevalent in other areas. Life coaching has developed significantly over the last few years, with many coaches specialising in niche areas such as health, financial and career coaching to name a few.
To concentrate on the rising demand for employing a career coach, why should you choose a coach to help you to progress in your career?
A career coach will help you in many ways. Like in the description of a sports coach above, they will help you to develop and reach your potential, be successful and achieve results. A career coach will normally work with you on a one-to-one basis and will often offer group workshops, teleseminars and e-books to support you to progress in your career.
A career coach can help you in the following areas:
Career exploration and discovery
You may be unhappy or dissatisfied in your job and feel that there is something else out there, but are not sure what it is. A career coach can help you to discover what is important to you in your job and make sure that it uses your talents, skills, and strengths, and provides you with the reward you deserve.
Understand your strengths and weaknesses
A career coach will help you to develop an insight into your strengths and weaknesses. This will allow you to understand yourself better and support any decisions you make in your career. It will highlight areas you may not have considered before and you can address any weaknesses that may be holding you back or use them to your advantage.
Develop your career vision and design your career
A career coach can help you to structure a plan to progress your career. By helping you to understand your skills and abilities, they can help you to plan your ideal job and how you are going to get there.
Develop confidence in your own ability
You may have a plan for your future, but you may be consciously or subconsciously holding yourself back. A career coach can help you to develop greater confidence in your ability as well as providing you with the support and motivation to help you to achieve your goal.
Provide job search support
A career coach can help you during all stages of your job search. From helping you to develop your CV, to finding the ideal job and then succeeding at the interview, a career coach will support you every step of the way.
Help you to get ready for promotion
You don't need to want to change your career to benefit from employing a career coach. They can help you to get ready for promotion, plan for the next step in your career, and support you to develop your talents.
Support you in the workplace
If you are unhappy at work, there may be many reasons why this may be so. A career coach can also help you to deal with difficult situations or people and become more assertive. You can increase your profile at work, build better relationships and improve your own personal effectiveness.
Make sure that your goals are congruent with other parts of your life
A career does not exist on its own and is part of your overall life. It is important that a career coach makes sure that your career goals fit in well with other parts of your life. For example, if work/life balance is essential for you, they will ensure that you consider this when planning or progressing your career.
Provide you with greater self awareness
Some career coaches will use psychometric tests or other techniques that will help you to develop a greater self awareness of yourself. A greater self awareness will help you to understand yourself better, build stronger relationships, and communicate more effectively.
Support you every step of the way
Like other coaches, career coaches will support you every step of the way.
Their role is to:
- Challenge you and ensure that you commit to making the changes you desire.
- Hold you accountable to the actions you want to take. You will need to report on your results, which means that as well as being accountable to yourself, you need to demonstrate what you have achieved to your coach.
- Question you and challenge your ideas and thoughts.
- Listen to you without any agenda for themselves, which gives you a chance to come up with your own solutions which are right for you.
- Celebrate your successes and recognise when you have overcome difficulties or challenges.
- Keep you motivated even when the going gets tough!
Need a Career Coach? 10 Ways a Career Coach Can Help YouProfessional business and life coaching is action-focused and results-oriented. Coaches enable clients to enhance their focus on developing successful solutions and to mitigate self-defeating beliefs about their performance.
Coaches have and instill a single-minded focus on achievement.
Professional Coaching is not for everyone and not all coaches are created equal.
Coaching is a learned discipline and a powerful medium between therapy, mentoring, and consulting. The character traits needed to be an exceptional coach are many and begin with the ability to truly listen and discern meaningful information in real-time. Also, the ability to manage empathy at its highest level is essential for developing the necessary connection between coach and client that leads to synergistic success. Furthermore, the ability to understand the client's personal and professional position in life and to provide overly valuable and timely feedback that challenges and motivates the client to develop relative skills to improve is an essential skill.
Coaching provides the client with a competitive advantage over the competition and enables an intense learning experience about oneself and the respective situation at an accelerated speed. This style of learning greatly enhances self-esteem and self-awareness inside the confines of a secure and confidential experience with a qualified personal coach.
A coaching candidate requires the ability to handle unbiased feedback that at times can challenge self-identity. A potential client should be resilient enough to overcome self-doubt and to meet predetermined goals for overall improvement. A determined need to be successful in life is a prerequisite for an outstanding client. Ultimately, having a coach is a fashion statement which says to the world that you are an overachiever who has the ability to employ a professional coach to maximize performance, potential, and opportunity.
Quality coaching is not cheap and the cost of coaching is relative to the expertise and support that is provided. A coach should constantly challenge their belief system and make constant changes for improvement in their personal and professional development. A coach should walk the talk and have a total commitment to the craft of coaching.
Coaching branches off into niches and specialties because of targeting a specific market and expanding from that specialized foundation, but coaching skills are universal and apply to multiple levels in personal and professional development. A truly skilled coach has the ability to adapt to the situation and rework their coaching tools to conform to the desired goals of their client.
Education is the ultimate equalizer and utilizing a coach to enhance personal and professional development to maintain equilibrium in today's fast-paced, 24/7 globalized environment is becoming a mandatory choice for continued excellence.
Why are some leaders exceptionally better than their counterparts? Why do some workers always excel in their work? Why are some parents better than others? They have a confidential secret that enables them to create an intense focus on achievement and that secret is professional coaching.
Secrets of Professional CoachingWhen I started on the Internet I had no idea how important keyword research was. I had no idea that I needed to have keywords in my article and blog post titles. I didn't realize that my articles and blog posts should be keyword rich. I had no idea what a title tag was much less how importnant it was to include keywords in my title tags.
Keywords are probably the most important single aspect of internet marketing yet they seem like the sort of thing that some techno geek should be concerned with not a coach. Start working on getting familiar with your best keywords and Google's Keyword Research Tool so you can out smart your competition.
Keyword research should be the first thing that you do when you are starting your internet business. Your keywords should be considered when choosing a domain name, business name, and almost every other aspect of your internet business.
Become a Spy
Take a look at the keyword Meta tags your competitors are using. I know that sound technical and difficult but it is very easy to do. Just go to your competitor's site and right click, scroll down until you see "view source" and when you click that it will reveal the "underside" of your competitor's website. Here you can see the details and at the top of the page you will find the Meta keyword tags.
There is a list of every keyword your competitor is using right on their webpage for you to see. It is a little sneaky but it is a common form of research if you are savvy to its existence. Now you are aware so use the tool to find the best keywords.
You should be able to gather a sizable keyword list by combining these brainstorming and research methods. Now that you have a list the next step is to determine how many people are searching for these keywords and phrases then narrow your list to the most sought after keywords that will bring the most traffic to your site.
Include keywords that are broad and narrow to do your research. For example, if you were researching coaching you could use a broad keyword such as life coaching or business coaching. A narrower keyword would be life coaching for women or life transition coaching.
The goal is to choose a keyword that is popular but not so widely searched that you will find too many people who do not fit your specific target coaching niche.
Finding the right keywords is an art and you will have to test different keywords to determine how effective each one is for your particular product, service and business. Keywords research is also an ongoing proposition because internet marketing is dynamic and things are constantly changing.
Get Coaching Clients - Uncover the Best Keywords For Your Coaching BusinessWhat matters most to you typically comes from your values. This is true in your personal life as well as your work. People who value relationships, for instance, often have lots of friends and choose to work in socially-connected environments or as part of a team. Others who value autonomy and adventure generally prefer to work alone, in remote areas or in niche professions where they call the shots.
Knowing what matters to you and what you need in your work, such as time with others or time alone, goes a long way to helping you choose what type of work and working conditions make you happiest, and best able to bring your talents and skills to the task at hand.
The challenge for many of us, however, is this: we are in careers, jobs or professions that don't feel like a choice - we simply ended up here. A friend who gets us an interview where they work; an entry-level job evolves into something we don't particularly enjoy but the money is good; we get comfortable doing something for years and lose our self-confidence, believing we are unable to do anything else. All of this spells one thing: boredom, dissatisfaction or burn out. We need a change... A new job, or better yet, a new career... but where to start?
Typically, many people start looking for new opportunities by perusing the classifieds, looking to find positions that could fit with a particular set of experiences, skills or competencies they have collected over the years. Resumes are updated and sent out, sometimes we are called for interviews and maybe we land the new job, which may or may not be better than the last one. If we are lucky, we're happy. If not, the cycle starts again.
Another strategy is to network: get to know people in your field, make sure they have your business card or phone number and stay in touch with them, lest an opportunity come across their desks that fits with what you do. This strategy has potential as you have developed another source of job opportunities - jobs that are not advertised in any of the usual places. This still involves sending out resumes, and going through the recruitment cycle and again, may get you the dream job, or may not.
In my experience as a Career Transition Coach, the best strategy is to start with the end in mind. If you want to be happy in your work, then start with knowing what makes you happy. Your values will tell you this. Take the time to really understand your values; ask yourself what is really important to you, what makes you feel alive and engaged? Is it work-life balance, so you have time with your family? Is it a strong feeling to make a difference in the lives of other people? Is it about learning and trying new things? Is it about being creative, bringing new ideas to life?
When you begin with your values, you have a head start on everyone else scanning the job ads. First of all, you start with self-awareness, and in really knowing yourself, you set yourself up to make choices that align with who you are. Secondly, with your values clearly articulated, you now have a set of criteria to use in vetting potential job or career opportunities - and you have something to tell your network so they will know which opportunities to send (and not send) your way. Finally, you are looking for work based on who you are as well as what you do. This alone will help you find and keep the kind of work that brings out your best qualities.
Many people say life is short. Yes, it is... but it is also deep. Getting to that depth starts with delving into what is most important to you and using your gifts, talents and capabilities to make a contribution to the world based on your unique set of attributes. Start your job search or career transition with an exploration of your values and you will likely find your life - at work and everywhere else - more satisfying than you imagined possible.
Career Transition - What to Do Before You Even Think About Updating Your ResumeIn an ideal world, the talented entry level candidate you hired straight out of college would grow and develop over the course of her career with your organization, ultimately evolving into a key leader who carries with her the lessons of every position she held as she climbed up the corporate ladder.
Not all employees will make the decision to stay with one organization throughout their careers, but when an opportunity exists to retain and develop an existing resource rather than hiring externally, it can be beneficial for both the individual and their employer. In order to capitalize on this type of opportunity, the appropriate tools and resources must be leveraged to help your great individual contributor make the critical transition to team leader and manager. Traditionally employers have turned to training programs to develop these skills, however in recent years that trend has been shifting towards a newer tool for talent management: management coaching.
What is management coaching?
In the past coaching was not offered as a benefit but mandated to those poor souls who were failing to achieve their workplace goals. From the executive suite to the cubicle, the term "coaching" was synonymous with "remedial training" and carried an implication of failure. For many, being coached was the last stop on the train to termination. Fortunately those days have passed and savvy business leaders and HR professionals have realized that coaching can be a great benefit for high performers and (when properly implemented) can turn things around for a struggling employee rather than being a last ditch attempt to salvage a poor business choice.
While coaching, particularly life or personal coaching, has gained some prominence over the last decade, the industry as a whole is still in its infancy. A wide variety of practitioners offer coaching services. Some come with newly minted certifications from training institutions (many of which have cropped up in recent years to exploit the recent popularity of the profession with career changers), while others are re-branded consultants or psychologists. Some effort has been made to normalize coaching credentials (most notably by the International Coach Federation) but most practicing coaches are measured by their experience and rapport with potential clients rather than any formal certification process. While coaching can take many forms, the one of most concern to business managers and HR executives is the form which takes place as part of an employee development program and is more commonly termed executive coaching.
Technically the term "executive coaching" applies to the act of coaching C level employees or individuals at the highest echelon of management. While there is certainly a substantial benefit to targeted programs for these key individuals, more recently this type of support has been offered at all levels of the organization, and as such has come to be more broadly described as "management coaching". Regardless of the intended audience, the goals are largely the same - to improve the effectiveness and enhance the performance of the individual, with the intent of improving (by extension) the organization as a whole.
How Does Coaching Work?
How do management coaches work with their clients to create these changes? Simply put, a coach helps an individual identify his or her strengths and weaknesses, and then guides them through the implementation of strategies to leverage their strengths and overcome their weaknesses. The core value of coaching is in its ability to focus on the specific needs of the individual manager being coached, as viewed through the lens of their organizational ecosystem. While training can provide general skills development such as time management or planning, coaching allows the manager to focus on the exact challenges of their personal environment, and to develop targeted strategies to overcome those obstacles. This combination of the trusted adviser relationship and intense focus on applicable skills makes coaching one of the fastest and most effective tools in resolving workplace performance issues.
A further benefit of management coaching is its focus on the development of skills by the individual being coached. Rather than forming a dependent relationship where the manager must always rely on (and have access to) his or her mentor, an effective coach will work to reduce the amount their client depends on them, thus building confidence and self sufficiency in the recipient of the service. Most coaching engagements last between 6 and 12 months, with the majority of active coaching taking place in the first 90 days of the relationship. So what actually happens during a coaching session?
The engagement often begins with the stakeholders defining specific, actionable goals and targets which become the metrics for success for the coaching process as a whole. One of the ways to uncover what issues exist is through the implementation of a 360 feedback survey. By soliciting input from the managers, colleagues and direct reports of an individual, the coach can then focus and on building an actionable plan to respond to any deficiencies, as well as to build skills in specific areas such as time management or communication.
Some coaches employ the GROW model - an acronym which stands for Goal, Reality, Options and Will. By defining the goal, accounting for the current realities of the environment in which the individual operates, finding options to achieve the goal and then applying the individual's will or commitment to complete the process, coaches can lead their clients through a structured process to achieve their targets. Other coaches use a holistic model to incorporate aspects of self awareness and personal growth into the process of developing the manager's leadership abilities. Each coach will have their own unique approach, and a key factor for the success of a coaching relationship is a productive relationship between the coach, the organization as a whole and the individual being coached.
Rather than relying on the presence or absence of credentials, organizations who seek coaching for their managers and leaders should meet with potential coaches to find out about their style and approach. Any reputable coach will be willing to provide references and to speak in detail about their experience with the challenges inherent in the proposed coaching engagement, and to describe how they intend to approach the situation.
How Does Coaching Benefit the Organization?
There are many situations where a structured coaching program can show tangible benefits to the organization. One scenario where coaching is commonly applied is to avoid management turnover. Change is a challenging issue in the corporate environment. Whether viewed as positive or negative change brings with uncertainties which can make employees anxious, and thus degrade their job performance. Management changes can be particularly disruptive because of the close relationship between an employee's relationship with their manager and their overall job satisfaction. Rather than hiring a new manager, many employers prefer to coach an existing resource to improve their performance, thus retaining the individual and avoiding both the impact of a management change and the costs of recruiting and on-boarding a new manager.
Coaching is often offered to individuals who have been identified by the organization as having leadership growth potential. Succession planning can be helpful in locating individuals who have the capability of growing within the organization, and coaching can help them do so successfully. This type of management development, once reserved for the executive suite has shown such a positive return on investment that it is now being applied at all levels of the organization.
Another scenario where coaching can have substantial benefits is when an employee is promoted from individual contributor to team leader. While many companies advocate promoting from within, the practice is challenging since the skills which make someone a fantastic individual contributor are not the same as those that make a successful manager. Further there are often internal political challenges to transitioning from being a member of a team to leading it. These can range from hard feelings on the part of team members who thought they should have been considered for the position to the failure of other managers to accept the fact that the new manager is now a colleague. Coaching can help a high performing individual learn to adapt their communication style and other processes to become effective leaders, and can help them avoid many of the pitfalls and errors that new managers commonly make.
Management coaching is continuing to evolve, but based on the results garnered in the first few years that the industry has existed it's clear that there are benefits to engaging professional management coaches which are not yet being fully leveraged in many organizations
Executive and Management Coaching - Best Practices For Employee Development