I tell my clients in the spiritual and consciousness/personal growth communities: Coaching is the sacred space in which you feel safe, with professional facilitation, to explore and embrace your essence—who you truly are at your core—and to move your life toward what you want it to be.
Coaching is a process that generates a disciplined intensity that challenges you to expand your perception of yourself, bringing into consciousness many aspects of how you live your life. This allows you to guide more fully your choices and your actions based on your chosen vision, purpose, values, and guiding principles.
Dan, How do you do this? You have a true talent for coaching!
Your coaching and guidance have been invaluable to me these last few months. You have a way of bringing laughter and wisdom to some of the darkest places and upholding the gems to the light. I want to express my deepest gratitude for helping me to get out of my own way and go for my values and purposes in life.
With your fun, uplifting approach, it's made it easier to focus on getting past the fear and given me energy to make some very big changes—like going from being an employee to re-creating my own business with a focus on my true ideals, and bringing my troubled marriage back to a state of health and happiness—and I look forward to what's next with excitement and openness to joy. Mostly, you've made it possible for me to see and value my own gifts and essence, and that gives me the strength to act in alignment with my true purpose.
–LD, California
In less woo-woo terms: Coaching is a partnership in which the client brings about change that moves their life toward what they want it to be through a process of discovering and aligning their choices and actions with their essence, vision, purpose, values, and guiding principles. In this partnership, the coach is a professional facilitator and champion in service to the client.
The purpose of coaching is for you to bring about change in your life—change that moves you toward the life you desire.
This change can be in both understanding (deepened learning) and situation (improved performance and progress in your personal and professional lives). This change is in service to your agenda, moving you ultimately toward truth to your essence—honoring your vision, purpose, values, and guiding principles. You move toward who you truly are.
The following sections present a further flavor of what coaching is like.
- Values – Personal values and guiding principles are chosen based on our essence and can guide our choices and actions in inside-out living.
- Empowering Language – Changing our language can change our reality.
- Inquiries & Stretches – Inquiries and stretches help you maintain momentum between coaching sessions.
- Gremlins – Gremlins can rob us of our enthusiasm and momentum, telling us we don't really need to change, or perhaps that we don't deserve what we want.
- Therapy/Consulting – Coaching differs from both counseling/therapy and consulting.
- Coaching Concepts – A compendium of additional concepts important in coaching.