Personal Coaching
Personal or life coaching is an investment in yourself and your ability to create a meaningful and fulfilling life and career.
Coaching for Creating and Living the Life You Want to Live
There is no such thing as a 'typical' coaching client, but many new coaching clients will already be grappling with how to complete some of the following statements, and they will be looking for a collaborator who can help them carry their explorations even further; do some of these apply to you?
- What matters most to me in life is...
- The kind of job I'd really love to be doing, if I didn't have to worry about money, is...
- The best thing about my life right now is...
- If I were to die tomorrow, I'd like to be remembered for...
- If I knew I were going to die in X months time, I'd stop what I'm doing and do...
- A year from now, I'd like to be...
- The thing I struggle with most right now is...
- The part of me I trust most is...
- I'd really like to work on improving...
- The philosophical problem that really stumps me is...
By helping you to clarify questions like these -- and many others which you will identify personally -- coaching helps you to seize responsibility for living the kind of life you want to live. When you discover what you really want -- not what you think you're supposed to want, but what you really want -- you take the first step toward crafting your life around the 'real you'. When you discover what you would like to be remembered for when you die, you take the first step toward ensuring that the life you live is exactly the one you'll want to be remembered for, rather than some distant cousin of that life. When you discover what parts of yourself you trust most or like the least, you take the first step toward bringing your ideal picture of yourself and the reality of yourself into convergence.
Balancing Freedom and Responsibility
Coaching also takes seriously the constraints and responsibilities of life: responsibilities to family and friends, responsibilities to behave in accordance with your ethical standards, and other responsiblities to self and others...as well as constraints like the finiteness of financial resources, the physical limits of the body and the processes of aging. But coaching works toward accepting responsibilities and constraints as influences which naturally balance in-built freedoms. The character of this natural balance is different for every person, but the most important point is that responsibilities and other constraints needn't impair the essential quality of freedom waiting to be expressed. We begin with the outlandish, the extraordinary, even the practically impossible, and then taper back to work within the boundaries of responsibility -- not the other way around (beginning with responsibilities and then wondering how to express freedom).
Coaching for Turning Potential Into Reality
Coaching is about turning your potential into your reality. It is about taking stock, looking inside and looking outside, deciding what you would like to make happen -- and then realizing that it is not only OK to make that happen, it is positively exhilarating! Above all, it is about learning to trust and value and develop your own internal resources -- your judgement, your creativity, your awareness of self and others, and your capacity to generate your own philosophical meaning in 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.
Or you can read more about my approach to coaching, more about my background, or more about some of the underlying principles of executive coaching which also inform my personal coaching.
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