Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.
Professional coaches provide ongoing partnership designed to help clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Coaches help people improve their performance and enhance the quality of their lives.
Coaches are trained to listen, to observe, and to customize their approach to individual client needs. They seek to elicit solutions and strategies from the client; they believe the client is naturally creative and resourceful. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources, and creativity that the client already possesses. *1
Why Does Coaching Work?
Coaching is effective because of three unique features:
Relationship: The core strength of coaching comes from genuine
trusting relationships. Clients often count their coach as one of their
closest advocates.
Collaboration: Client and coach become a powerful, synergistic team
for pursuing change as they work together on the client’s goals.
Structure: Rarely does significant progress happen in an
individual’s life without a specific plan. The coaching relationship
helps provide the support necessary to pursue goals in a truly
systematic and focused way.
Who Works With Len as a Coach?
Men of all ages, stages of life, and backgrounds benefit from coaching. These can include leaders, entrepreneurs, educators, executives, those in vocational ministry, parents—just to name a few.
What Does Coaching Focus On?
Coaching works in just about any area of life—personal performance, life-focus, organization, business start-up or expansion, spiritual growth, healthful living, relationships— whatever area of life in which a person wants to change, grow, learn, or improve.
The focus of coaching depends on what the client wants to focus on. In a successful coaching relationship, both coach and client give 100% to certain unique roles.
Coaching is especially potent as a component of any training event or seminar. Studies have shown that adding pre- and post-coaching to any learning experience increases actual application of what is learned by as much as 400%. In other words, if you add even two months of follow-up coaching to a training event, participants will be four times more likely to apply what they learned than if they hadn’t had any coaching. Unarguably, follow-up coaching effectively facilitates the transfer of training information to actual real-world practice.*2
2. G. Olivero, G., Bane, K. D., and R. E. Kopelman, Executive Coaching as a Transfer of Training Tool: Effects on Productivity in a Public Agency. Public Personnel Management, 26(4) (1997), 461-469.
