Executive Coaching
Executive or management coaching aims to develop your natural capabilities, your capacity for sound judgement, your creativity and awareness of self and others.
What is Executive Coaching Good For?
An executive coach does not stand on the sidelines and lead cheers, and an executive coach does not read out the playbook for you to memorize new tactics or business manoeuvres.
Rather, an executive coach works with you one on one to develop your own inherent skills and your own unique 'way of being', augmenting the solid foundation upon which your performance as a manager and leader is built.
Coaching clients are often after some or all of the following -- do they apply to you?
- Developing or expanding strategic vision
- Building self-esteem and enhancing professional presence
- Increasing ability to achieve buy-in from others
- Enhancing flexibility and responsiveness
- Becoming more at ease with themselves
- Improving ways of handling stress
- Regaining balance between life and work
- Increasing expressiveness
Overall, coaching is driven by what you believe to be important, because I believe you are the best expert on your own experience, and you probably have more insights than anybody else about your own challenges and their possible resolutions. Coaching helps to identify, enhance, challenge and creatively expand those insights to give you more freedom and direction in your own personal and professional life.
A little of how this works is described separately on the page What to Expect?.
 If you're ready to begin, just click on Getting Started.
Optional Areas of Executive Coaching Focus
While your priorities will drive the executive coaching experience, I am also particularly prepared to work with you in three focus areas which many managers and leaders find helpful.
These three optional focus areas are described briefly below and in more detail on separate pages, while another page specifically discusses management skills vs. leadership skills from a coaching perspective.
Better leaders and better managers are, above all, better listeners. They take the time to understand and respect what it is like for someone else to be doing the job they do -- not just from their own position in the world, but from the other person's. This is called 'business empathy'. They extend the same courtesy to themselves, by listening to what their own intellect, emotions and instincts are telling them. They learn to heighten their awareness of what their bodies and minds are telling them and work with, rather than against these messages. Read more about listening to and understanding the self and others.
Better leaders and managers accept and recognize value in what is. While often aiming for what could be, they nonetheless avoid preoccupation with what should be: thoughts like "I should be more respected", "they shouldn't have done that", "she ought to know better" and other such thoughts distract attention from the reality of what is and how best to work with it. Read more about accepting and valuing what is.
Finally, better leaders and managers are honest and transparent (or authentic) both with themselves and others. They 'know their own minds' and recognize the role of their own emotions, thoughts and instincts in shaping their behaviour; far from suppressing these natural features of human psychology, they value them and express them to others when appropriate. This honesty with others means their actions are not seen as mysterious or inexplicable and threatening by others, but are understandable, trustworthy and appreciated. Read more about being honest and transparent.
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