How coaching works

5 key pointers to successful coaching

You may have been staunchly independent your entire life, never relying on the input of others. Conversely you may have benefited from having a mentor through your professional life. However, sometimes we all need a little help to get us through a sticky point, and that’s where coaching – the art of improving the performance of others – may just be the thing to help you close a gap between the present situation and the desired one.

In a work environment, a coach helps develop employees and executives by mutually assessing performance, discussing the current situation, defining achievable goals, exploring new initiatives and supporting a coachee in a plan of action.

When adapted for use in your personal life, a life coach can open doors to your ability to develop new skills and talents, and enable you to improve your decision-making abilities, or determine how to best handle life challenges.

Tempo Toronto spoke with Carol Sachowski, President of storycoaching inc. in Toronto about the benefits of coaching. She is a specialist in leadership development, executive coaching and organizational effectiveness, and is also a highly effective life coach outside the corporate environment. Her personal coaching practice zeros in on individuals wanting to work on personal and interpersonal matters such as work/life balance, career transitioning, changing belief systems, coping with sudden change, improving communication skills, and living a happier, more fulfilling life.

About business and personal coaching, Carol says that “The beauty of coaching is that the line often blurs between the two as the client unearths issues around integrity, well-being, bottom line results and heightened self awareness. Significant and life altering impacts are far from uncommon, and many clients wonder how they managed for so long without a coaching component to their lives”

Here are Carol’s five things to know about coaching.

1. When you are stuck somewhere, or perhaps have lost belief in yourself, a coach works with you to encourage you to to hear your own voice telling that which you, really, know to be true.

2. While it takes your own work, a coach will work with you to help you identify your own solutions. At the same time she or he will look to you for signs of commitment to yourself. (Otherwise, it’s just a chat.)

3. Your coach is an effective sounding board, with no agenda of their own, and from whom there is no fear of harsh judgment, injury, or your private information and struggles being shared.

4. Your coach partners with you, and walks along the same path until you are ready to say goodbye. During your coaching life together, you can expect to see an improvement in your own confidence, to become more decisive, to achieve clarity of mind and to become calmer. With the clarity comes renewed ability to make sense of what you’re encountering, and to make peace with what you are bumping up against currently.

5. Your coach should have their own personal groundedness, be doing their own inner work too, and have credentials (such as Carol’s International Coaching Federation certified coaching course, and her Graduate Certificate in Executive Coaching).

The frequency and duration of coaching depends, of course, on individual needs. For a specific issue, you may need two or three meetings. For others you may need to meet once or twice a week for a few months. A single session may be helpful – what Carol calls an “amuse bouche” of coaching – to give you a voice of clarity in the moment, before going deeper with more sessions.

Our sample session related to an unusual (for us) inability to make a decision that would affect the development of Tempo Toronto, something we’d been spinning over for a few weeks. Having got comfortable with Carol, she asked those incisive questions: “What is it that you know to be true already?”, “What is the cut off point for you?” and “What happens when you consider some different scenarios.”

Clarity. It was amazing. 24 hours later, decision made. Confidence increased. Calmness prevailed. Everything she told us would come to pass inside our heads, did.

We encourage you to try working with a coach yourself.

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