Items tagged with "coaching":
If You Can’t Be With the Job You Love, Love the Job You’re With
A recent Huffington Post story that is doing the rounds talks about the negative effect working in a job you hate has on your health. All of the effects that are listed are also symptoms of burnout. As I frequently maintain, we get burnout from doing too much or too many of the wrong things – the...
Building Your Coaching Practice
So, you’ve just completed your coach training and you are newly minted Life Coach. Now what? This is something I have thought a lot about over the last 12 years – both for myself when I was starting out as a just-certified coach in 2007, and for the many new coaches I have mentored and supported...
Women and Burnout
Every year, there is much attention and fanfare about International Women’s day. The week that 8 March falls in is filled with news and views about women and the importance of recognising our importance. While some people are not convinced that there should be a day dedicated to thinking about women...
When the Coach is Ready, the Clients Appear
I coach, supervise and/or mentor many coaches. One of the recurring issues that comes up in sessions is bewilderment and frustration about erratic work. It’s a phenomenon I also experience, as I suspect most coaches do. Some weeks we are so busy we can barely draw breath and other weeks we have...
Why Don’t We Pay More Attention to Ourselves?
Last week I gave a free continuing education phone seminar for coaches. The topic was “Understanding and Preventing Compassion Fatigue for Coaches”. Having been on the receiving end of compassion fatigue more than a couple of times, and having witnessed and coached a not inconsiderable number...
Survivor Self and Love
Why is that so many adult children people find it difficult to be in an intimate relationship? A staggering proportion of people struggle to find love. Almost as staggering is the struggle to stay in love in a healthy way. Type ‘why can’t I find love?’ into Google and you will get 592 000...
Don’t Spend Money You Don’t Have
So you’ve got your certification as a coach. You’ve completed your training, passed your assessments and are ready to go out and change the world and all the people who live in it. And you’re terrified. What if no-one comes? What if I don’t get enough clients? What if I never get any clients? What...
Are You An Adult Child?
You don’t have to be an ACoA (Adult Child of Alcoholics) to be an adult child. An adult child is anyone who had a childhood that was inconsistent or unpredictable in some way or for some time*. This could be due to alcohol or drugs (or any kind of addictions) but could also be because of lots of...
Supervision – somewhere to put things down.
Coaching can sometimes be a very challenging profession for me. I hear all my clients’ secrets and hurts, fears and dreams. I share their joy and their sadness, their triumphs and their defeats. And then I go home and can’t share it with anyone. Part of my contract with my clients is absolute confidentiality...
Resurrect Your Dreams
In the early days of my being a coach I had a conversation with Martha Beck about what I wanted to do with my coaching. I hummed and ha-ed and spluttered and mumbled and talked around in circles for a while (it was my first real, individual conversation with her and I was completely overwhelmed by enormity...
Love and Work
“Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.” Way back in 1930 Freud made the observation that much of our life purpose is influenced by our ability to do meaningful work and our ability to love meaningfully. Not much has changed since then. We are still defined – rightly or wrongly–...
Just because you don’t like hearing something doesn’t mean it isn’t true.
How often have you consciously and willfully ignored the truth of something that you didn’t want to hear? I know I have - more times than I care to remember. Two (out of many) examples to illustrate what I mean: Years ago I decided to buy a new car. Despite many people warning me that the make of...
Life Coaching not Life Laundry
I hate it when coaches share the details of their clients’ sessions/conversations/journeys on social media. It doesn’t matter if it's a celebration of progress, a request for help and support or just plain ‘look at what a great coach I am’ sharing – any online exposure of client details* and...
How You Do Anything is How You Do Everything
If you are anything like me (and the rest of the world), you have a few little habits that are microscopic reflections of your way of being in the world more broadly. Perhaps more than a few… If you pick one – any one – smallish habit you will see how it is reflected in bigger ways in other parts...
Don’t Forget to Remember Yourself
How many times have you got into bed at night and remembered that you forgot to do something you promised yourself that morning? Many of us spend all of our waking moments thinking about others, listening to others and doing things for others. It is often only in the calm and quiet that descends when...
3 Steps to Getting Unstuck
Feeling stuck is horrible. That sensation of spinning in infinity on a hamster wheel (often of our own making but sometimes not), or being imprisoned in a web that we have weaved around ourselves is nasty beyond description. Feeling stuck sucks. It keeps us in situations that we don’t want to...
Meet them where they are
For some reason (some) coaches feel that a ‘proper’ coaching session is only a coaching session when the client leaves with a new skill, an epiphany, a new life-path, a personality change, or any or all of the above. There has to be a lot of ‘heavy-lifting’ and technical work in each session. ...
Valentine’s Day Blues
The sight of Valentine’s Day paraphernalia in shops can be a little depressing. The in-your-faceness of all that enforced romance is hard enough for people who have an ‘other half’ (be that half better, worse or indifferent). But for people who are not-so-happily unattached, all that stuff is...
Act Out Your Frustrations
A new year can bring with it feelings of despair. After a good holiday spent with people we love, doing the things that we love, we often come back to reality with a little bump. The bump of sameness and stuck-ness. Of boredom and being-back-on-the-hamster-wheel. Of “is this all there is to life?” It...
Self-Sabotage or Self-Rescue?
I often witness clients beating themselves up (sometimes literally as well as figuratively) for getting in their own way. They get really cross with themselves for wasting an opportunity, messing up an interview or not studying hard enough for an exam. “I don’t know what I keep sabotaging myself”...