Coaching Techniques

I employ the following techniques to help my clients choose their goals and achieve them.

“Talking With”

Often, we as a species feel that we are not allowed to share our deepest selves with others. We feel that others will not understand or support our deepest feelings and ideas. I embrace this sharing of information in a supportive and fully confidential atmosphere for it is only in articulating for ourselves what we feel we need and want out of life that we begin to walk our authentic path.

My clients and I discuss how to realize their life’s goals and dreams. I combine both intuitive and practical guidance on how my clients can forge their highest path personally and professionally. Together, we find concrete steps they can take to identify and choose goals and achieve them.

Verbal and Written Communication Technique Evaluation and Improvement

We evaluate the language you use in your personal and professional communication. I’ll help you refine it so you get across what you’re trying to say.

Professional Communication

We will review your resume and cover letters to make sure you’re putting your best foot forward in that crucial first step. We’ll also prepare you to speak confidently, authentically, and persuasively in your interviews.

Personal Communication

We’ll review how you interact with your friends and loved ones. Together, we will determine how you can best connect with them. With these techniques, you’ll deepen your relationships and achieve your personal goals.

Coaching Techniques Missions

As part of the Life Coaching process, clients receive Missions. Missions are positive, internal and external tasks that encourage clients to pursue their own healing and progression towards an authentic, balanced life and an increase in self-confidence and self-esteem. I encourage clients to think of these as holistic healing homework. To learn more about missions, please see the Life Elements missions page. Missions can stem from my book, “Life Elements,” and we customize them to fit the needs of the client.

Affirmations

“Affirmation is a positive statement of (positive) belief.”1 Affirmations are written down in an effort to introduce more positive and affirming thought patterns into our lives. After a time, writing the affirmations daily helps change both our thought patterns and our patterns of behavior. As an example, please try the following right now. Take a blank sheet of paper and write out the words: “I am a wonderful and successful writer (or painter or musician or whatever it is that you are),” ten times in a row.

Please notice what happened to you as you were doing this simple exercise. Were there any thoughts that came up as you wrote the words? If so, what were they? Did you agree with what you were writing or did you disagree and think this was nothing more than a silly waste of time? If you disagree, I encourage you to take a look at why it was so easy for you to disagree with a statement that affirms your positive attributes. Affirmations can help free us from negative thought patterns and introduce and establish new positive and forward-thinking patterns. The correct affirmations (and they are different for each of us) can essentially help re-pattern our ways of thinking of ourselves and of the world around us.

Tasks

We often have dreams but those dreams are not allowed out to play. The tasks that arise from the coaching process encourage finding the appropriate methods of discovering our authentic selves. Truly, these tasks can expand our horizons and help us become our true selves in all aspects of our lives. Sometimes, the tasks can be challenging, but they are always tasks that are in line with helping the client live their life with an authentic purpose.

For example, one of my clients has been told that he cannot sing. Indeed, he can sing and in fact, through the technique of Therapeutic Creativity, I encouraged him to do so. He began singing and it helped propel him into an aspect of his life that he had never dared explore before. True, it was challenging for him to step out on stage at one of my singing/music student recitals (in front of an extremely supportive audience) but once he did and once he realized that he truly enjoyed sharing his music and his voice, he was unstoppable. Our deepest and most creative selves can be found if we only look for them.

Focus

Together, I and my clients focus in on both the goals and the processes that must be undertaken to achieve those goals.

Conversations

In order for us to live authentically and walk our true path, we must have many conversations with our friends, families, and colleagues. Sometimes, these conversations are easy and sometimes they can be challenging. However, when we have these talks we can more fully realize our potential as sisters, brothers, parents, children, lovers, husbands, wives, friends, and indeed human beings. I work with my clients to find the best approach to these conversations so that they can be conducted in as loving and supportive a manner as possible.

Journaling

Writing down our thoughts and feelings was something that many of us did when we were young. The pages of diaries and now blogs can hold all of our dreams, frustrations, desires, and plans. When done for a specific purpose they provide answers to many of the clients’ questions.

Often, during a session, I will note an issue the client needs to address to aid in further progress. The client will journal on those issues so they can glean and benefit from what they write. We can express our most intimate selves in our journals and they will remain private. This allows for a more honest and authentic approach to our lives and by looking at and interpreting what we have written we can build our path from this technique.

Movement, song, poetry, dance, drawing and/or performance

These most creative tasks of the coaching techniques help clients find answers to questions and provide insight into your next steps. We establish their preferences on which creative expression will best provide insight. Then, I give them creative missions to accomplish to help provide those answers.

Go back to the main Coaching page.

Contact me if you want to book a session.

1. Cameron, Julia, “The Artist’s Way” GP Putnam’s, 1992