Coaching is fundamentally about facilitating change that will lead to desired results:
facilitating movement from a current state to a more desirable future state.

The International Coach Federation (ICF) - the largest professional association of coaches - defines professional coaching as an “ongoing partnership that helps clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives.”

Through the collaborative process of coaching, clients deepen their learning about themselves and the opportunities and issues in their lives, improve their performance, and enhance their quality of life.

However, general definitions and claims mean little because coaching is focused on what the client wants to accomplish. Therefore, the best way to understand what coaching would mean for you is for you to experience it yourself. You may request a brief sample session with one of our coaches. Contact us at 602-569-2426 to set up an appointment to speak with an Adler Certified Professional Coach, or complete the form on the “Coach Referrals” page of our website.

Why do people hire a coach?

Just about anyone who perceives a gap between their reality and their dreams is a potential coaching client.

Most people who seek the services of a professional coach want to manage time better, improve their career performance, make better business decisions, have higher-quality relationships, be more physically fit and well, explore spiritual and personal fulfillment, set and achieve more ambitious goals, and further their financial independence. But these findings are generalizations from thousands of coaching clients. There may be something else that you want. A professional coach may be able to help you clarify what that is, generate options for achieving it, and identify barriers to your moving toward it.

A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be. - Tom Landry

Coaching as a Tool: People can reach their goals on their own, but coaching makes it happen faster, and expands their options.

What would coaching do for me? A survey of coaching clients identified outcomes of self- awareness, setting better goals, achieving a more balanced life, lowering stress, self-discovery, improved self-confidence, a higher quality of life, better communication skills, and improved project completion. Because coaching is tailored to your specific issues, your own list of outcomes may include all of these and more. It is very likely to include at least some.

What’s the ROI (return on investment) from coaching? The same survey confirmed that 98.5% of coaching clients found their return on coaching to be worth the investment; 70% of coaching clients rated it a very valuable. Because coaching focuses on your own goals and context, determining the return on your investment is a unique process. Your coach would be able to work with you to create a measure of returns that would satisfy the demands of your situation.

I manage people in my organization. What would having their own coaches do for them? The
answer would be different for each person, but generally coaching helps people change in ways they may have wanted for some time but haven’t been able to accomplish. It provides a safe place for people to be honest with themselves and ambitious in their goals. Importantly, in an organizational context, coaching can be tremendously effective in building teams and improving employee relations and job satisfaction.

What about coaching skills for myself and for others I work with? At Adler, we help you and your colleagues learn to employ some of the powerful skills that coaches use, with many measurable results: improved performance, better relationships, and enhanced quality of life. The Adler Foundations of Coaching course introduces these basic skills in scheduled weeklong sessions, or on site at your organization.

What is the Coaching Experience Like?

Coaching as Relationship: The coaching relationship is a collaborative relationship between the coach and the client in the service of the client’s goals. It is a partnership that involves self-honest assessment, learning, support, challenge, constructive action, and personal accountability.

Coaching as Process: Coaching is a process designed to facilitate change. This includes change in the client’s subjective experience of themselves, as well as changes in the outside world in the form of objective results. The coaching process supports change through learning, action, feedback, and reflection.

Coaching as Conversation: Conversation is the vehicle through which coaching takes place. A coaching conversation is one is which the client gains clarity, explores possibilities, sets goals, designs actions, evaluates feedback, and reflects. To be an effective coach, one must achieve a high level of communication skills. Some of the key skills for powerful coaching conversations are listening, clarifying, asking powerful questions, reframing, confronting, brainstorming, requesting, and acknowledging.

Issues worked on in coaching may be narrow and specific, or broadly overarching.
The questions people bring to coaching are broadly clustered around:
1. Fulfillment: Who am I? Why am I here? What is important to me? How can I achieve balance in my life?
2. Learning: Am I growing, mentally and spiritually? What information and skills do I need to acquire in order to further my objectives?
3. Performance: Am I maximizing my potential? What actions must I take, &/or what behaviors must I change, to achieve my goals?

The decision to hire a coach can be triggered by many factors, such as:
· Organizations use coaching much as they would training or consultants; the difference is that studies have shown coaching to produce more profound and long-lasting results than training or consultation; organizations have also discovered the benefits of using coaching after training or consultation, to dramatically enhance and sustain change
· Time of transition (divorce, mid-life, retirement, widowed)
· Career dissatisfaction
· Failure to meet performance targets at work
· Relationship frustrations - with significant other, children, or co-worker
· Lack of self-confidence
· Personal challenges, such as ADD
· The need to make a difficult decision
· Repeated failed attempts at a desired outcome
· Feeling out of control or unbalanced in life
· And other reasons, as many and varied as the coaching clients themselves
· Feeling out of control or unbalanced in life
· And other reasons, as many and varied as the coaching clients themselves

Who Becomes a Coach?

People come to coaching from 3 career domains:
· People working for a corporation or organization, who intend to use coaching internally
-- Human Relations specialists, who employ coaching to improve interpersonal interactions among employees and to enhance performance
-- Managers, executives and team leaders, with a mandate to improve team performance and cooperation, and enhance bottom line
-- Teachers, who use coaching to facilitate learning and engage students
· Professionals who wish to expand their skills and services to include coaching
-- Counselors, psychologists, social workers and other behavioral health professionals, who want to add a powerful new technique to their professional tool kit
-- Mediators, for the same reason
-- Business consultants, who want to move from a style of giving advice to one of encouraging clients to come up with their own solutions
· People who wish to make a career change
-- Entrepreneurs, who plan to open a coaching business
-- Retiring professionals, who wish to extend their expertise to a new context that’s flexible to meet their retirement lifestyle
-- Specialists, such as teachers, health care professionals, attorneys, engineers, and others, who intend to use coaching to assist others in their field of specialty

The participants in our Professional Coaching Certificate Program always bring a wealth of prior experience to their coaching training. In the past, the group has included seasoned HR professionals, counselors and therapists, training and development professionals, organizational and change management consultants, outplacement and career consultants, senior managers in a variety of organizations, and mediators.

Coach training provides powerful new skills and an additional income stream for professionals in private practice. For those working internally for an organization, coach training makes one a more effective and valuable leader, better able to build a cohesive team that works at its highest potential. Coaching credentials are a desirable enhancement to anyone’s resume.