Coaching

What is Coaching and who is it for?

Broadly speaking, coaching is a way to support change and development in a person’s life.  Until the late 20th century, coaching was limited to maximizing human performance in athletics.  As change and complexity in organizations accelerated, the coaching model was adopted by progressive companies to quickly develop managers and executives, and push their performance to higher and higher levels.  The coaching field then broadened to include life coaching - supporting personal development beyond the workplace: relationships, family, well-being, life purpose.  Training programs and accreditation standards developed to keep pace.  Today, anyone who feels pulled to higher levels of personal or professional performance can use a trained coach to leverage both the effort and the result. 

Working with a coach can also be an effective way to just get unstuck.

We all feel stuck from time to time, like we’re stepping on the gas but the wheels just spin in place.  We can’t seem to get any traction.  Or maybe we feel like we’re in a fog and can’t get the clarity we want about something important to us.  Or we feel called to something greater, more noble, more meaningful that requires us to rise to our highest potential; yet it seems to elude us.  We’ve tried to apply what we learned from classes, books and workshops, and these strategies often produce quick results - only to fade over time - and we end up back where we started.  Sometimes we just get knocked down -  by an illness, an accident, a breakup, a failure, a layoff, a betrayal, a death - and we can’t figure out how to get back up.

These kinds of transitional moments are when personal coaching can facilitate key breakthroughs and sustainable change.  Working with a skilled coach can provide the following dimensions that are not available when applying self-help strategies:

•  become more aware of your current way of seeing and relating to what is important to you - what’s great and what’s limiting

•  gain access to a new way of relating that’s more expansive and opens up new possibilities

•  engage in specifically designed practices that build new capacities to embody this new expansive way of being

•  gain new insight and understanding through powerful coaching conversations that provide real support and modeling of healthy relationship

•  more objectively see how systems you are a part of (workplace, family, friends, nature, schedules, practices) can support you and can be dynamically influenced by you

What is Integral Coaching® and how is it different?

Integral means having or containing all parts that are necessary to be complete or whole.  Integral Coaching® includes and goes beyond the athletic focus on training and action steps, while still being a metaphorical muscle-building method.  It includes and goes beyond the executive focus on personal and organizational goals, time, strategies, and synergies, while still developing mastery-level skills.  It includes and goes beyond the life coaching focus on internal and shared meaning, connection, boundaries, and fulfillment, while still deepening self-awareness and presence.

As an Integral Master Coach™ I am trained to accompany you on a journey to:

• clarify what you want to happen over the next few months (your coaching topic), why it is important and how it impacts your life and the lives of those around you

•  take a step back, see yourself from the outside, appreciate how you’ve been able to get this far, and identify what’s not yet available to you (that’s required to get you the rest of the way there)

•  see and feel clearly into who you want and need to become in order for you to have the life and results you want (hit the mark in your coaching topic)

•  build new awareness and new capacities through specific practice and reflection exercises to gradually and naturally step into a new way of being

•  learn to identify and lean into your leading edge of personal growth that will keep your momentum strong and the direction of your life true

I have a particular passion for coaching couples and individuals in transition.  Check out the Couples and Individuals pages to find out more.

Integral Coaching® is a regisered trade-mark of Integral Coaching Canada Inc.and is licensed to Michael Phillips