COACHING SERVICES

Career coaching is my particular area of expertise given my professional experience in careers work over the last 15 years. My experience ranges from young adults considering their career and educational choices to those embarking on a second or even third career. More recently, I have coached several clients on the opportunities facing them as a result of redundancy.

Coaching can cover a wide range of topics that arise at different points in your work life. For example:

• initial career/education choices - work 'v' further study, degree options, finding out what type of work might suit you
• getting your first job - finding opportunities, researching the job market, CV assessment/applications, self-presentation, preparing for interviews
• getting the most from your existing role - communication with your boss and colleagues, making an impact, time management, presentation skills
• career progression - raising your profile, planning a future move, training and development, preparing yourself for promotion
• career change - seeking a new job or direction, return to work, assessing your strengths, presenting yourself to employers, preparing for semi or full retirement
• redundancy - taking stock, networking, targeting applications, staying positive, identifying and marketing your key competencies.

My aim is to enable clients to be creative with the possibilities facing them and to build confidence and self-esteem by raising awareness of their strengths and special gifts. One tool I use is the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (for more about MBTI see below), a personality assessment tool that helps clients identify their natural strengths and gifts. Knowledge of your personality type can be used in many ways, from career choice and workplace preferences to improving relationships and managing stress.

The benefits of coaching include:

• greater confidence and impact at meetings and in presentations
• a calmer, more relaxed approach having worked through work priorities
• heightened clarity about your strengths and how to sell them internally and to new employers
• higher productivity at work
• more positive beliefs about your potential and what you can realistically achieve
• improved motivation, having set goals appropriate to you and your role.

Trying to maintain a healthy balance between our work and non-work lives is a constant pressure in the modern workplace, especially if you have dependants such as children or older family members to consider as well. Successfully managing the juggle may involve:

• reviewing your priorities, so you have a better idea about what's important to you as well as what's urgent
• looking at what drains your energy and what revives you
• assessing how you use your time
• learning to say 'no' to requests for help/work, even social events!

Part of this wider area may include your own fitness and well-being. As well as supporting your physical health, having time to exercise often improves performance in other areas of your life by clearing your mind and allowing improved focus. Issues I have worked on with clients include:

• how to ensure the motivation for taking exercise stays high
• working out a timetable for work and exercise that fits best with a client's lifestyle and bio-rhythms
• thinking of ways to take exercise that don't involve costly gym memberships.

The benefits of coaching include:

• reduced stress levels about not having enough time for everything
• a clearer sense of your priorities and what's most important to you
• better use of your available energy
• more effective time management
• higher levels of assertiveness and self-esteem.

There are many clichés about the importance of home in our culture and a bewildering range of ways to spend your money on it! Our home life has a big effect on everything else we do, as it provides the foundation for our lives. It's also the one place we always come back to, wherever we go during the rest of the day.

• How does your home life measure up to what YOU are looking for in a home?
• Does your schedule leave you with little or no time to enjoy the pleasures of being at home?

Coaching can help you with some of the bigger decisions about your home (buying or renting, relocating, extending) as well as the smaller but no less insignificant ones (refurbishment, decluttering, organising your space better etc).

The benefits of coaching include:

• Completing a project that you previously struggled to get started on
• Clarity around where you want to live and the sort of home you want
• Working out your priorities on domestic chores so you don't feel overwhelmed
• Planning a strategy to organise a refurbishment or building project
• Creating the type of space inside your home that works best for you and your family.

Recently, I have helped clients with:

• managing a domestic refurbishment project alongside frequent travel on business
• how to prioritise household and garden chores so that they don't take up all available free time
• decluttering projects and room moves
• creating a home office.

Relationships are truly the 'stuff of life'. However, while we might recognise their importance, it's not always easy to manage them smoothly on a day-to-day basis. Clients bring a wide range of different issues and problems to coaching under this heading, from finding a new partner, to managing friendships to handling family differences and ensuring good working relationships with colleagues.

Coaching is a powerful process that allows you to step back and look at what's going well and what's not. With its focus on generating ideas for action and taking these forward, one step at a time, you can start to see immediate change.

The benefits of coaching include:

• developing assertiveness skills, so that you feel comfortable asking for what you want and saying what you mean
• avoiding unnecessary conflict by tackling disagreement or hurt early on
• securing co-operation and commitment to change by setting out clearly what's involved and appreciating the impact on others
• confidence in your ability to get on with people and in your contribution to the team/family unit/relationship.

I have worked with clients on issues such as:

• communication - resuming contact with a family member after relations had broken down
• expectations - managing the expectations of junior members of staff to minimise constant interruptions during the day
• assertiveness - setting tougher boundaries with friends who frequently back out of social arrangements
• relationships at work - devising a strategy to improve the relationship with a member of staff who isn't a direct report and looking at ways to deliver feedback in a non-confrontational way
• handling domestic changes when step-children are involved.

Confidence/self-esteem is a huge area of concern for many people. In an increasingly competitive world, where there is so much more information to measure ourselves by, it's easy to feel we are not 'measuring up' to expectations, be they ours or those of other people.

Benefits

Coaching can help in many ways. We can look at your 'limiting beliefs'. These are the negative things we say to ourselves that we can accept as true if left unchallenged. Things like, 'I'm rubbish at sport' or, 'I could never present to a large group' or even, 'No-one will like me if I do that'. These beliefs are challenged, broken down into parts that we can work on and then replaced by more empowering beliefs.

Coaching will also encourage you to look at what you're good at, what has worked for you in the past and will put you in touch with your existing inner resources. As one client found, "[Coaching] … has allowed me to better understand my own 'inner workings' and will allow me in future to apply the lessons learnt during coaching to a wide variety of other challenges." Mike, UK Strategic & Pre-tactical Manager, NATS. See testimonials

There is also the chance to use the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), which assesses your natural preferences and analyses your strengths and unique gifts See below for more about MBTI .

I have worked with clients on issues such as:

• making a better impact in meetings with colleagues
• developing the confidence to say 'yes' to voluntary redundancy and go travelling for a year
• learning to say 'no' to activities when you already have a full schedule
• building motivation to start networking in a new area of work
• thinking positively about interviews for new roles post-redundancy.

As a trained user of the MBTI*, I offer this as an extra service to clients interested in finding out more about their personality type and the implications for relationships, career/work preferences, management of time, stress and behaviour generally.

The MBTI is a self-report questionnaire that identifies differences between 16 core personality types. These types are based on four parameters:

• Introversion/Extraversion - where you focus your energy. Maybe the inner world of ideas, memories and emotions (I) or the outer world of people, experience and activity (E)
• Sending/Intuition - how you take in information and what sort of information you're attracted to. This may be real and tangible information, such as facts or figures (S) or the big picture, with more attention directed to the patterns and links between facts (N)
• Thinking/Feeling - how you make decisions. This can be by looking at the logical consequences of a choice or action (T) or by considering what's important to you and to the other people involved (F).
• Judging/Perceiving - how you deal with the outer world, living in a planned, orderly way (J) or living in a flexible, spontaneous way (P).

Because the MBTI explains basic patterns in human behaviour, it has a wide variety of applications, from self-understanding and development, career direction, problem solving, relationships, educational choices to managing stress and time. Combined with coaching, the MBTI can provide great insight into the issues being discussed.

* I trained in 1995 with OPP Ltd (Oxford Psychologists Press).