Life and Executive Coaching - Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

This FAQ is regularly updated with the latest developments in life and executive coaching together with experiences working with clients, generally speaking.

Life and executive coaching works in the area of human performance. It works with people in all walks of life to identify problems and issues that may be preventing people from performing at their peak. It also identifies barriers to normal performance and also works with people at the peak of their performance that may need to come down from the great heights safely. The subject matter expertise (SME) for life and executive coaching is performance, understanding how to coax and extract performance from people who are unable to perform in any aspect of their lives that they decide it is required in. But life and executive coaches cannot carry out the tasks and goals that led to performance so we work with our clients to spark them, to encourage them, to support them, to give them the confidence, to give them the self belief to do it themselves. We bridge across the aloneness of achievement to provide the necessary support and encouragement to enable clients to deliver the best performance they are capable of.

There are a number of answers to this question. Firstly a person who is emotionally or otherwise close to the person they are trying to help doesn't necessarily have the objectivity and detachment required to be able to diagnose in a person a problem that may be causing them not to perform or that they may be hiding, very well in some cases. A non professional relationship does not have the degree of precision required to target with pinpoint accuracy what the cause of the problem is. This is especially when the person has devised a number of day to day and longer term strategies to avoid dealing, mentioning, going close to or in any way acknowledging that the problem or a problem exists. There are cases where a person's close family and others mentioned above themselves are involved in the performance problem by having provided advice and encouragement in the past that has led to failure. That same person then being involved in diagnosing the cause of the problem and providing strategies to deal with it lacks credibility and objectivity, especially when they may be called upon to judge their own performance, advice and direction previously provided. Besides a life coach provides more that the spark, he provides the necessary insight to be able to prepare the person for life and executive coaching.

Life and executive coaching provides a relationship that is similar in some ways to friendship but with some differences. The advice is based not on friendship but on professional expertise and advice knowing the person's background, history, circumstances, aims and goals in life. There is no self involvement as such from a life coach. A good life coach does not solely aim at providing a framework for setting and achieving goals. A life coach understands and appreciates that there is a preparation required for life coaching that requires an expertise in dealing with people who are too afraid to move forward, to move on. This fear arising from fear of failure, fear of success, previous attempts and failures has to be dealt with. The obstacles that engender the fear have to be dealt with. The hurdles have to be approached and dismantled before life coaching in its goal setting can commence.

This is a very common perception. Firstly, it must be said that especially with younger people who are very resilient and patient and have lots of time relatively speaking then the "do nothing" strategy may pay off in time, given enough time, enough introspection and analysis, enough reflection and self analysis and knowledge. But in some cases, enough for it to stand out, even young people do not make it back and stay in the self imposed limbo that previous failures has condemned them to, they are in self imposed solitary confinement in terms of life coaching and the brilliant performance that they know they are or may be capable of but somehow cannot for the present time reach. Having said that, in some cases given enough time and self introspection a person without help may come back and perform brilliantly especially perhaps in a life they performed poorly in before (truly inspirational) or in a new field perhaps (more likely). But these individuals are few and far between especially those that fall off the horse and get back on again straight away time after time. With time a further number will get back on the horse. With time and external help a certain number will get back on the horse again. There is probably a certain percentage who even with more time and more external help and resources will never get back on the horse again.

Life coaching then concentrates on those people for which time is not a healer. For which time sees them further and further away from their goals, perhaps forever. These people needs a short circuit, a kick start to bring them back to reality to the main game. This comprises the majority of people who seek help from life coaches. They are either in the "with time we'll get back on our feet" or "with time and external help we'll get back on their feet" category. The top 10% who fall off and get back on straight away do not require help and the bottom 10% who fall off and have resigned themselves to never getting on the horse again are perhaps beyond help at least from a life coach.

In the first instance, we provide people with the necessary insights and precision to objectively target the problems areas. The benefit with this advice and support is that it reduces dramatically the recovery time required before a person would naturally move on again. Not only that but also we provide them with the necessary tools and techniques to understand and appreciate how these blockages form and how to better deal with it in the future. There may be instances where without help and advice the person has managed to remove the shackles and obstacles to performance but they may have no idea or insight as to how it occurred so in future there is no lessons learnt to rely on in similar circumstances. Secondly with those people who with time and external help do eventually move on. A life coach provides that necessary advice and support in those areas most required to help the person move on. That advice is in all the areas previously mentioned in terms of preparation for life coaching such as problem identification, problem targeting and problem resolution and life coaching mechanics such as goal identification, goal setting and goal achievement. Our benefit in the latter case is also that we reduce the time required for getting back on one's feet because we target very precisely what the problem is, addressed professionally and objectively.

Fundamentally the techniques involved in both is very similar. Executive coaching has previously denoted working within large corporations with their senior execcutives to achieve corporation wide goals. These goals are basically the personal responsibility of a senior executive but the aims, goals and achievements are purely corporate in nature, for the good of the company. But the problem with that definition is that in working with executives one-on-one who may have organisational goals, the techniques used are those of life coaching. There are some differences in terms of attack, target audience and goal management but essentially life coaching applied in an organisational context with organisational goals at stake is executive coaching. There have been some extensions of executive coaching to apply to business type coaching and also to small and medium business enterprises and their owners. My approach to being a life and executive coach is that the subject matter expertise for a coach is performance and the art of achieving top performance consistently and healthily. The fundamental subject matter expertise is performance.

Pure Life and Executive Coaching

This is a difficult area to provide a definitive answer as it is also developing rapidly as is most of the subject areas canvassed here. The question is whether life and executive coaches should confine their work to performance and extracting the best performance from the client or should they also whilst doing so, and if it is in an area in which they are an expert, also provide advice in the subject matter of their expertise? I think this is something for whoever you are working with and how you deal with your fundamental expertise in a life and executive coaching context. There is indeed in the industry some blurring between the core competence of the life and executive coach and the particular subject matter expertise he may have in any underlying subject matter the client may be involved in. I think that in a life and executive coaching context, a coach is not about to make serious recommendations in terms of a course of action or other decision. It is the responsibility of the coach to bring the client up to a point where they feel comfortable to make those decisions themselves. In a life and executive coaching context, a coach makes no decisions, make no recommendations in terms of decisions and certainly does not influence a decision one way or another in the underlying subject matter that the client is involved in. When a coach extends his influence in a subject matter area other than life and executive coaching then it is a different type of coaching which I am calling applied but more fundamentally it is about the subject matter not coaching.

Applied Life and Executive Coaching

Where one provides advice and support in an underlying subject expertise of particular importance and relevance to the client and related to the coaching engagement, one should inform the client I am providing this advice in terms of my expertise in this or that area. The expertise and experience I have in this area allows me to make recommendations which as a life and executive coach I would normally not do. My advice is this area is open and total disclosure to the client of your expertise in any particular area that the client is seeking advice in, refraining from making any use of that expertise or making any recommendations until the client becomes aware of your expertise, requests it and understands the caveats normally in place when providing advice of that nature. It is in a sense a more specialised coaching service one is providing over and above the normal expertise of a life and executive coach. My solution to this problem is to identify clearly (and this web site is an ideal example) when I am acting as a life and executive coach and when I am working in an area of my expertise (in my case IT generally and project management as one of my areas of specialisation) where I may or may not be utilising coaching principles and techniques. Obviously when I am not using the coaching engagement model I am just purely a project management expert but when I combine coaching with it, then the caveats above should apply. To simplify things for example when I operate as a coach in project management, I identify myself as a Project Management Coach. Similarly a coach working in a small business context and applying his subject matter expertise in small business should identify himself as a Small Business Coach.

For a generalised answer to this question, please see this web site generally especially the program information but the Portal also goes into this in some more detail. But generally speaking there is no action without thought. If there is action without thought then there is a risk or a danger that the action being uncontemplated may not provide the optimum outcomes for the actionee, if you will. This is almost always the case when one is proceeding under the impression of a gut feeling without rational analysis. It is recognised that there will be occasions when to take advantage of a fleeting opportunity one has to take immediate action to exploit an opening. But understanding that this is the precursor for the subsequent action then there is a likelihood that the action taken will not lead to a desired outcome. One has to question the validity of opportunities that only occur momentarily or fleetingly. Generally speaking, in life coaching terms at least and to reduce the risk inherent with proceeding with gut feelings, there is a period of reflection and contemplation required before acting on any hunch or idea. This is not analysis paralysis but basic life coaching risk management practices.

Firstly people in corporations (not corporations themselves) are wanting a leading edge to their career armoury . This is the new avant garde for those leaders and politicians of the future who not just want to succeed but who have a burning desire to succeed at whatever cost personally or otherwise. Executive coaching is the performance enhancing drug of the corporate animal. It is the anabolic steroid equivalent for elite corporate performers. Think about it, a 100 metres champion is like a CEO of a corporation one in 50,000 literally and champions being the brutal and vicious competitors that they are (they wouldn't be there without the killer instinct) are looking for that extra boost that will give them an edge, however minuscule (the only thign that matters is winning, the margin is absolutely irrelevant and the cost is payable whenever whatever), over their competitors. Whilst using steroids (roids in popular parlance) and other performance enhancing drugs is illegal or at least outlawed by sporting bodies, executive coaching is not only legal but wildly popular to give executives and corporates the edge over their competitors.

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Life and Executive Coaching Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

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