What brought you to coaching?
I contacted a coach when I had my own health issues and was struggling to balance work and life, Coaching helped me to clarify my values and changed the priorities in my life. After experiencing the benefits of Coaching I knew it was a skill that would be useful to incorporate into my own consulting work and I enjoyed coaching so much that I made the leap to focus on it full-time.
What was your profession before becoming a coach?
My background is management consultancy where I worked with companies across a wide variety of sectors to implement change projects – projects ranged from IT projects to implementing people change. The one thing I noticed was when you don’t focus on the impact that change has on the people in your organization, this is when projects can fail. This is where my interest in people development comes from. I love to focus on understanding how you can get the best from your people in your organization, while ensuring they are getting what they require in working with the organization as well.
What was the most rewarding part of the training/journey?
As part of studying to become a qualified coach, the client sessions that you complete are brilliant because you get to see the results clients can achieve as a result of the coaching. For my own coaching skills, I loved getting feedback during the practical assessment and found this really useful to tweak how I was coaching.
The variety of being able to do some work online, and integrating this with live training days allowed me to meet a great bunch of people – all from different walks of life with different experiences.
Where are you now? How are you using your coaching skills?
I set up my business to help companies and individuals define their ambitions, find solutions and implement the appropriate changes. I focus on business coaching programmes aimed at corporates; business owners and career coaching for individuals helping clients to make decisions. Combining my background in management consulting with my coaching skills gives me an ability to understand a company’s strategy quickly and challenge my clients in relation to what results they are looking to deliver and how they are going to make progress quickly. All my work is about helping people to define what they want to achieve and providing them with the tools/insight to achieve that.
What is your favorite coaching question?
When people are struggling to make a decision between options, I like to get them thinking about what they really want. ‘In a years’ time if you were to look back at this situation, which would you regret more, doing that or not doing that?’
What do you enjoy most about being a coach?
The reason I love to coach is the satisfaction of seeing my clients grow in confidence and achieve what they want to achieve. Seeing them move from a place of uncertainty, stress, doubt in their lives to more confidence,
What are your top tips for people who are looking at coaching?
If you are considering coaching to incorporate into your existing work or a new career path, I would recommend trying coaching for yourself – go to a coach and/or attend the two-day intro course from the coaching academy. When you experience coaching for yourself and see the results, you will understand the benefits it can bring and how it can be incorporated to a number of areas of your life.
The Coaching Academy was established in 1999, and is now the world's largest coaching school.
In that time we have trained over 14,000 people to become life coaches.
We are accredited by the International Coach Federation and the Association for Coaching, and we're rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot.
