Find Clarity and Growth
What I enjoy doing
I am passionate about helping people gain awareness and clarity of their thoughts, behaviour and feelings so they can obtain their objectives.
I help explore the behaviours of others, and how to communicate in a way where it is more likely they will be understood and to lower the chance of conflict.
I also enjoy creating team building experiences where people walk away with more knowledge and experience around building trust and cooperation.
Personal and Profesional Growth
These two are intimately intertwined, and exploration of one will positively influence the other.
Gentle guidance from a coach can help liberate energy to build a career and ultimately a life path that has meaning.
Below are some examples of topics that can crop up in coaching sessions. I have explained what they mean to me based on what I have read and trained in. Coaching styles are as unique as the number of coaches out there, so here are the type of conversations to expect if I have the pleasure of accompanying you.
Making Decisions
Do you ever wonder why you made certain choices in the past? Would you like to make decisions from a place where your thoughts, feelings and actions are aligned?
Our identity often impacts how we currently make decisions. It is closely linked to meaning, which is based on our values/beliefs, objectives and lived experience.
Exploring what happens when there is a lack of coherence between these can reveal why we make certain choices in specific areas in our life.
And it can help to make new ones.
Relationships and Communication
Tired of not being understood, or not understanding others?
What motivates us, how we see the world, how we talk to others…everything is linked to personality types that are present in all of us. Being aware of people’s behaviour can give us insights on how to adapt our own communication to get our message across more successfully.
Communication can also be worked on using other angles. Nonviolent Communication can be used to make requests, so everyone’s needs are met instead of an uncomfortable compromise. Transactional Analysis can explore how to keep a healthy conversation going, or how to end an unhealthy one. And why we seem to have patterns in our behaviour with others.
Self-Esteem
Have you ever given much thought to what type of person you would like to be? Do you use this to make choices in your life?
Self-esteem is based on the difference between how we view ourselves, and our ideal self. Making choices based on who we want to be is a large part of the journey.
Raising self esteem involves asking questions about our behaviour and feelings on certain subjects. For example: Do you feel included? Do you want to influence people? Do you feel significant? Competent?
In a professional setting, this is interesting as productivity is highest when people are openly sharing information. This can be directly linked to self esteem as described above.
Autonomy
What is autonomy?
Not simply independence. It is a gradual process, with stages.
When a person starts a new job for example, it’s a journey. At first, we work together to be shown how to do things. With time I start to critically analyse what I see. Then I can do things by myself, and better sometimes! Eventually our identity becomes strong, helping guide our choices from the inside. We can now help others or submit to authority without losing ourselves. This is called interdependence, and is one level above independence!
And it keeps going. Being able to be several states at once. This is desirable in companies, where we may find ourselves with people below and above us hierarchically, and have equals too.
Lastly, the final stage is finding meaning. Finding coherence between objectives, values, and experiences.
This level of autonomy in a team setting is closely related to the stages of development of a manager. Their focus on either content, processes or meaning will impact the team’s growth.
Manager’s Stages of Development
Are you the specialist that has been promoted? Often people that provide solutions are given a team to manage. This requires learning different skills, moving away from technical expertise towards developing relationships. Communication, regulation, learning to be OK in chaos…
Are you interested in developing your team members? The team feels more like a group with time, and you are wondering how to become even more efficient. As a manager, you are looking to encourage autonomy and cooperation by focusing on relationships.
Maybe you would like to ground your observations in some theory. What are management styles and which one resonates with you? How can you use communication channels and peoples perception of the world to promote motivation? Does the truth matter?
Maybe you are already a leader: a manager who looks at things through the lens of meaning. Someone who checks for coherence between objectives, values, experiences? On a company level? Managerial? Personal?
Team Building
There can be many motives for coaching a team. For example: clarifying a teams mission, looking at a cultural change due to reorganisation, managing conflict, integrating new arrivals, mobilisation of teams…
These examples can be simplified to three main areas. One is usually the initial prompt for teambuilding to be asked for. They are complimentary and often all creep into a coach’s intervention.
Operations: is there an objective to be achieved? Such as a new product launch?
Regulation: is there a need to work on communication between team members? This can range form sharing representations to build a common vocabulary, to managing a difficult conflict.
Training: this can be a couple of hours or even a full day, with models presented to the team and then time given for them to experiment with them.
It is often complimentary to coaching the manager. Even if he isn’t benefiting from individual coaching, he is a key member of the process.