Coaching FAQs
What is coaching?
Coaching is a proven approach to sustainable change. It’s a collaborative partnership between you and an experienced and qualified coach where both parties are 100 percent committed to your flourishing. Using proven, pragmatic methods that include asking powerful questions, crafting relevant embodied practices, and offering precise feedback and reflection, your coach serves as a compassionate and committed partner in your growth, interjecting new perspectives, rigor, and accountability into your transformation. The ultimate goal is for you to actualize your potential and to create the life you desire.
What is integrated coaching?
Integrated coaching brings your whole self into the coaching process: mind, body, heart, and spirit. We take an integrated approach because you are a whole person and your well being involves all of these dimensions. In many cultures, we live and work head-first. Our bodies are often viewed as a vehicle for transporting our brains around, our emotions are often experienced as something that gets in the way of what we need to do, and our spirit is often conceptual and amorphous and often thought to be accessed by leaving the body behind. In our experience, these distinctions, although well developed, do not reflect how we actually live, work, love, and make decisions.
In reality, we are much more integrated. When we consciously involve our mind, body, spirit, and emotions in the coaching process, we find that our clients are able to access deeper resources, opening accelerated pathways for their own development as well as new possibilities for creative and effective action. It is quite common for our clients to also come into contact with memories, experiences, and conditioned tendencies that are “stored in their tissues” and contribute to the sense of being stuck. Working gently through their bodies, they are often able to release the hold, and begin to feel more present, connected, and alive.
How do we involve the body in coaching? We start by focusing on our nervous systems and experimenting with how we can effectively self-regulate to be more centered, open, and connected. This enables us to be more responsive to life, rather than constantly reacting to what comes our way. We also pay attention to sensations in the body. Don’t worry if this sounds hard, most of us need to actively re-learn how to feel sensation in our bodies. By experiencing these sensations directly, we begin to unlock their underlying wisdom and discover our own internal navigation systems. We also practice new perceptions and skills in the body—remember how you learned to ride a bike?—so that we can become the people we want to be and build the lives we desire.
What is the difference between personal and professional coaching?
Personal and professional coaching focus on many of the same challenges and opportunities just in different contexts. In both spheres, inner work is necessary to realize outer results whether that work involves gaining clarity, confidence, and resilience; making and fulfilling commitments; nurturing centeredness and becoming less reactive; or enhancing communication and connection; or thriving in the midst of change or a reset. What’s more, results are additive: gains in one sphere translate to gains in the other.
Why engage a coach?
An effective coach enables people to get unstuck. Over time life can hijack your sense of purpose, well-being, and belonging. An expert in personal transformation, an effective coach can help you catalyze desired movement during stuck moments in your life and career. Together you identify the change or desires you most want, what’s enabling you to move forward, and what’s getting in the way. Together, you can co-design an engagement that will unleash energy and action, getting you back on your way.
What type of results can I expect?
Each client’s experience is unique. Our clients start where they are and move forward toward their specific goals in a rigorous, systemic, yet customized way. Our clients often express that they get much more out of their coaching engagement than they originally thought possible.
Some of the results that our clients report include:
Deeper self awareness, integration, embodiment, and a more positive, confident, and empowered sense of self.
Enhanced quality of presence and trustworthiness resulting from consistent self regulation, enhanced emotional range, and expanded access to choice over reactive automotive behaviors even in moments of stress.
More authentic and satisfying relationships with friends, family, colleagues, and people who are experienced as challenging.
Greater joy, fun, fulfillment, connectedness, and aliveness.
Greater effectiveness in generating purposeful and effective action toward their personal and professional commitments.
Growth in capacity to navigate change and thrive in an increasingly complex world.
How many sessions does it take?
The scope of our engagement depends on your starting point, goals, availability and level of commitment. Have you been involved in personal growth work for many years or are you just getting started? Do you have a specific roadblock you are looking to address or are you looking to transform your life in a bigger way? Are you ready and have the time to commit to make significant changes in your life? The answer to these questions helps us determine whether you are best served by a one time 90-minute consultation or an ongoing coaching engagement.
The typical arc of a coaching engagement consists of:
An initial conversation in which we determine if coaching is for you, who might be the best coach for you, and what we might want to explore and achieve in our work together.
A discovery session in which we further explore desired coaching outcomes and relevant background information.
Ongoing coaching sessions in which we draw upon state-of-the-art somatic coaching practices, current neuroscience, trauma research, bodywork (if desired), ancient wisdom, and daily practices to enable you to achieve your desired outcomes.
Final session in which we bring the series of coaching sessions to completion, and consider whether it makes sense to continue to work together for another series of sessions, or if you are better served by completing this engagement, and co-planning for your continued growth and flourishment.
Why do I need to practice between sessions?
We are what we practice and we are always in some form of practice whether we are conscious of it or not. For example, if we always distance ourselves from conflict, either by avoiding the issue and/or the people involved, we likely have a default practice around conflict. We may be so embedded in the practice, however, that we might think this is just who we are, rather than something we are practicing unconsciously. The good news is that we can change what we practice and therefore change who we are and what we are able to accomplish. What we practice is what we become. In this way, practice is a central part of any growth process. Your commitment to daily practices that serve your purpose and support your growth is essential to your success.
What coaching isn’t…
We are trauma-informed coaches, however, coaching is not therapy and does not substitute for therapy if needed, and does not prevent, cure, or treat any mental disorder, physical condition, or medical disease. If you are currently under the care of a mental health professional, we recommend that you inform your mental health care provider about a potential coaching engagement in order to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of all of your personal growth work.
Coaching is not to be used as a substitute for professional advice by legal, mental, medical or other qualified professionals. You are always responsible for creating and implementing your own physical, mental and emotional well-being, decisions, choices, actions, and results.
Our code of ethics.
We operate under the International Coaching Federation’s (ICF) Code of Ethics, which describes the ICF core values, ethical principles, and ethical standards of behavior for all ICF professionals.
