About Coaching
What is Professional Coaching?
Professional coaches provide an ongoing partnership designed to help clients yield desired outcomes in their personal and professional lives. Coaches are trained to listen deeply, observe completely, and customize their approach to individual client needs. They believe clients are naturally creative, and resourceful, and can create both powerful thinking and powerful answers for themselves. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client. The coach's job is to elicit more fully the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already has and to help the client determine how to use those assets more powerfully and for greater results.
I come from a professional background where my job is to give expert opinions and/or my friends and co-workers tell me that I am good at giving advice. Will these skills give me some advantage in becoming a Professional Coach?
While these skills are excellent, the skills do not reflect the coaching process. Instead, as a coach, you will assist clients to create better thinking and more powerful ways of being for themselves. This practice of eliciting from clients and having clients create for themselves allows clients to engage in powerful and sustainable learning that can be replicated and used long after the coaching process ends. This process requires that you, as the coach, will stop giving expert opinions or advice. This is often one of the most difficult transitions for people seeking to become coaches, but once made, allows the coach to give control of learning and progress to their clients.
Why choose a career as a Professional Coach?
Coaching continues to be one of the fastest-growing professions in the country. Coaches can create an individual business, join a coaching company, or seek employment as internal coaches. Those who start private coaching practices may, with sufficient effort and confidence, create a successful business that gives them an excellent income, complete control of their time, and a chance to work with clients oriented to growth, change, and achievement. Coaches can also choose to coach part-time to supplement an already existing income. In short, today's coaches can design the career and income they want in a way that best serves them and the life and business they seek to create.
Why choose to acquire coaching skills as an executive, manager, human resources professional, or consultant?
Many already accomplished leaders and professionals choose to add coaching skills to their toolboxes for working with people. They do so because a coach’s approach creates more powerful partnerships that yield more effective and powerful results. A coach’s approach improves communication, helps co-workers, subordinates, and clients gain clarity, establish self and group accountability, define breakthrough outcomes, and work in much more satisfying ways. A coach’s approach creates more inspiration and creativity and greater connectivity with others. Thus, most leaders and professionals find that the addition of strong coaching skills to an already excellent technical or managerial skill set increases the results they achieve personally and professionally.
Are there independent professional organizations and certifications for Professional Coaches?
There are no credentials currently required by any governmental entity to be a Professional Coach. There are, however, several professional organizations and credentials given by those organizations including the International Coach Federation (www.coachfederation.org), the World Association of Business Coaches (www.wabccoaches.com), and the International Association of Coaches (www.certifiedcoach.org). The decision to pursue a professional credential is individual for each Program completer. As with every professional, Program completers should invest the time and energy necessary to learn about each professional organization, which organizations might serve them best, what credentials they offer, and what requirements exist for each credential. Program participants should also check frequently on websites as each organization manages the requirements for its credentials and those requirements may change.