You engage a coach for one simple reason
To create the future you desire
"Coaches are the companions of those who dare."
This may be the most elegant description of a coach I've encountered. It's attributed to my mentor and founder of Newfield Network, Julio Olalla, addressing an International Coach Federation conference. Sometimes, the only way forward is to jump off into the unknown. Not every journey is this dramatic, but if you've been called to jump, it's a very good idea to not go it alone.
Dramatic or not, all coaching journeys are forward-looking and guided by your agenda, continuously evolving and expanding. Envisioning your hoped-for future. Choosing outcomes to bring it about. Taking actions to produce these results. Along the way, your coach helps you to see and move through whatever stifles or limits your progress. You can enter at any point in this process, from dealing with a challenging situation, to fleshing out a plan for outcomes and action, to clearing whatever is obscuring your vision. But regardless of where or how you enter your coaching partnership, as you persist, your journey will take you to a continuously expanding horizon of possibilities.
Your Future
Creating Your Vision: Where do I want to go? And for the sake of what, do I want to go there?
Clarity is key to vision and clients arrive along a spectrum of clarity about their dream for the future. Some are crystal clear about the future they want. Some start with a picture missing pieces. And some come with very limited or no vision at all, knowing only that they don't want, or can't tolerate, more of the same. A coach works in all three realms and along the entire spectrum.
Your Outcomes
Defining Your Mission: What results must I achieve to advance me on my path toward my vision?
If you have no destination in mind, any road will do. Manifesting a specific future takes a bit more planning. Clients arrive along a spectrum of understanding of what must be done to improve their condition and move toward their desired future. Choosing outcomes designed to bring a vision to life draws on experience and imagination. Good coaches masterfully tap into your deep creative genius for your solutions.
Your Actions
Developing Your Plan: What actions must I take to produce these outcomes?
Having a plan of action is one thing. Executing it is quite another. Two factors impact the action you will or will not take to produce your outcomes - capability and willingness. Capability is a matter of competence and resourcefulness. Willingness is a matter of values and belief. And belief is key to your expansion. It sets the limit on your horizon of possibilities and defines your potential. Clients show up somewhere within a matrix of capability and willingness, from capable and willing, to incapable and unwilling, and everything inbetween. Capability can be acquired or delegated. Willingness, however, is exclusively yours. You own it, 100%. And it is grounded in beliefs. Beliefs you allow to govern your life. Beliefs that throttle and frustrate. Beliefs that propel and empower.
Your Change
Removing Your Obstacles: What's in my way and how must I change to move past it?
This is the richest coaching territory. On the surface, required change often appears as behavioral. But deeper, lasting change lives in your beliefs. Your beliefs define your world and how you move through it, shaping your behavior. They aren't your enemy, they're necessary. They provide stability and comfort and a foundation to build your life. But if a belief stands in the way of positive relationships and a future you desire, change is necessary. Uncovering this is a process of self-discovery. And the ability to facilitate this is the domain of a skilled ontological coach who will believe in their willing client until they can believe in themselves, turning the coach's "I believe in you," into the client's, "I believe in me!"
Throughout my life and career, one observation stands above all others as responsible for attracting me to coaching in general, and ontological coaching, in particular. Good intentions and perfect plans die a slow death under the suffocating weight of limiting beliefs. The defining moment in a coaching relationship is when the client, guided through deep, powerful inquiry and curiosity, wakes up to an awareness that changes everything. New eyes, new vision, new outcomes, new life. It looks like magic. And perhaps it is.
Could you benefit from having a coach? Probably. I believe most people would. There's a saying among professional coaches: "You can spot the coached."
Do you need a coach now? Only you can answer that question, so I'll keep the door open to a conversation. We can explore that possibility when you're ready, or before, if you dare.