What is coaching?
Coaching is the art of improving your performance and unlocking untapped potential. The coaching process closes the gap between where a person is and where they want to be. Coaching draws out the best in a person and promotes discovery. Coaching enables a person to take responsibility for their lives and to maximize their talent. Guiding others into increased competence, confidence, and commitment to reach their goals is part of the coaching process. Coaching unlocks a person’s potential to maximize their performance (Gallwey).
A coach engages in active listening which might include the following: attending to the person’s agenda; hearing the person’s concerns, goals, values and beliefs; distinguishing between words, tone of voice and body language; mirroring back what a person says; building on a person’s ideas and suggestions; and, by allowing the person to vent or clear up the situation without judgment or attachment in order to move to next steps.
A coach asks powerful, provoking questions to evoke discovery, insight, and commitment that moves to action. Asking questions create clarity, possibility or new learning and moves the person forward to what is desired. A positive impact is made upon the relationship by using clear, articulate and direct questions or questions to reframe perspectives.
So, who needs a coach?
A person who is interested in growth and development and forward movement in their lives may benefit from having a coach help them make strategies for change. People who are going through transition, facing challenges, and those who have forgotten how to dream need a coach to propel them forward into a new life of discovery and adventure.
The following is a list of coaching outcomes:
- Create new ways to leverage your strengths
- Demolish mindsets that hold you back
- Mesh your values with your lifestyle
- Manage your energy, not just your time
- Define and refine your mission for yourself
- Carve out space for yourself, family, and friends
- Discover new solutions to old problems
- Accomplish more in less time and have fun doing it
- Strengthen relationships
- Clarify what really matters
- Move through transition successfully
- Enlarge the vision for your ministry, business, career, and relationships
- Live passionately and joyfully!
What is a Performance Coach?
Performance takes you beyond the minimal to the extraordinary. You go beyond what is expected and surpass what others demand or expect. Realizing your full potential requires taking full responsibility and ownership for your life. In order to reach our greatest potential, we must demand complete attention and no distractions from the goal. “Coaching can lead to performance beyond the expectations of the coach, and beyond the dreams of the performer.” (Whitmore, page 98)
Coaching optimizes people’s potential. In the work place, quality of life can improve and business can offer countless opportunities for personal achievement of goals. Challenge motivates us to move forward. Performance should include learning and enjoyment.
Dr. Rambo coaches to facilitate extraordinary performance in personal, career, and business endeavors. If you are interested in taking charge of your life and moving to new levels of happiness, success, and accomplishment, then you may greatly benefit from performance coaching. Coaching helps ordinary people do extraordinary things.
John Whitmore, Coaching for Performance, was published in 1992 with three editions. He describes executive coach, small business coach, and life performance coach in the following way:
- Executive Coach–Coaching for the executive empowers them to tap into more capability than they are currently experiencing. It encourages them to adopt a powerful optimistic view of their dormant capability and seek creative ways to release potential. Coaching allows the person to view life and business from new perspectives. In the work place, the following would be some areas where coaching could unlock potential and maximize performance:
- Motivating staff
- Delegating
- Problem solving
- Relationship issues
- Team building
- Appraisals and assessments
- Task performance
- Planning and reviewing
- Staff development
- Team working
- Small Business Coach–Small business owners benefit from coaching as they help their employees by mutually assessing performance, discussing the present situation, defining achievable goals, exploring new initiatives, and supporting the employee in their plan of action. A coaching environment in a small business can maximize potential, create positive relationships, and increase the bottom line. Investing in people in the short term can reap benefits in the long run.
- Life Performance Coach–Effective coaching will unleash the spirit and deep desires, expand your capacity to achieve real change, and perhaps even provide personal transformation. This happens when change alters a person’s experience of living more on purpose. (Williams & Davis, 2002, pg. 20) Coaches help their clients redesign their lives for effectiveness and personal fulfillment.
What is a Dream Coach?
Have you arrived in the middle of your life and discovered you are wandering in the “dark night of the soul” or in meaningless desperation looking for yourself. Have you discovered you are way off course and miserable? Have you forgotten how to dream and hope for a different and better reality and future? Are you willing to take some chances and discover your true path? If you are willing to make changes and travel down a road you have never ventured down before, you can find purpose, fulfillment, delight, and excitement.
Dream coaching is for you if you have ever hoped or believed you could achieve something remarkable with your life. Like the genetic code that describes your personality and unique gifts and talents, your dream was imbedded in you from birth. Your dream draws you to the life you were born to live!
Are you ready for adventure as you give yourself permission to dream and find your life purpose? Become a DREAMER and begin your journey of discovery!
Coaching is different from counseling in that counseling often focuses of the past, and emotional or psychological difficulties. Counseling is a health service that often requires working with physicians to coordinate treatment, medical stabilization, and recovery. Coaching is for personal growth and development.
If you are interested in coaching, please contact Dr. Rambo at 615-744-9141 or drbrendarambo@gmail.com.
