FAQs

What is coaching?
Coaching is a future-focussed and action oriented collaborative process which is non-directive and client-led. It serves to unlock learning & potential, offering new perspectives and ways forward.

Aimed at developing skills, overcoming obstacles, and achieving goals, coaching can help us identify our strengths and weaknesses, develop our interpersonal and communication skills or improve our decision making abilities. A little bit like leadership, coaching is not about pulling people onto our path - instead, it’s about helping to shine a light for people to find their own path.

Unlike therapy, coaching is forward looking, often centred around goal setting and set on helping the client move forward. A lot of work happens around values and beliefs, and through skilful application of a number of practices such as Transactional Analysis, NLP, CBC and others.

A coach is a facilitator of this process, here to question the answers and not answer the questions, gently steering the client towards the ways forward that work best for them, providing them with the tools and strategies to move forward and achieve professional and personal success.

What can I get coached on?
People come to coaching for a variety of reasons - it can be that they simply feel a bit lost, or it could be that their life seems out of balance. They sometimes come with a very specific goal that’s either personal and professional - the coach helps them further define or explore this goal, uncovering the motivation behind it and obstacles that may be in the way. Typical avenues for exploration revolve around career challenges, relationship issues (both those at work and in private life), work performance or work-life balance. Sometimes the clients just need a safe space to explore and deepen their understanding of themselves, behaviours or values. Often, things surface during the conversation - it’s not unusual to come to coaching with one agenda, only to uncover more underneath and shifting the focus. You don't need to be able to articulate your challenges concisely to start speaking to a coach. Some people have very clear goals in mind, for others, they might simply say 'I feel stuck.' Either is fine.

How can coaching help me?
Coaching isn’t for people who "need fixing". It's for people who want to evolve and grow - if you're already deeply satisfied with all aspects of your life and work, coaching isn't for you (would love to know your secrets though!). For everyone else, coaching can help on a myriad of levels and can be valuable to those wanting to achieve (and set) personal or professional goals, unblock issues or simply move from A to B.

Because coaching is a collaborative process here to help unlock potential, develop a sense of purpose and direction and ultimately and help clients move forward, a lot of work happens through deep listening, enquiry and exploration with coach employing a variety of tools, frameworks and techniques to unlock whatever it is that’s holding the client back. We work a lot around mindset shifts, examine values and beliefs (sometimes deeply held) and set goals to work towards.

As long as the intention is future focused and action oriented, and the client has a clear desire to make positive changes to their professional or personal life, coaching is a suitable and often invaluable support mechanism for us to explore, examine, learn and take action.

Is the coaching industry regulated?
Coaching is a relatively new industry and at present unregulated. Ethical coaches train with one of the qualified providers and may chose to get professional accreditation with one of the main professional coaching bodies such as ICF (International Coach Federation), EMCC (European Mentoring and Coaching Council) or AC (Association for Coaching) which exist to raise professional standards and ensure that coaches act in client’s best interest. All professionally trained coached adhere to the Global Code of Ethics agreed by the mentioned professional bodies and usually engage in regular supervision.

What are your qualifications?
I trained with In Good Company who are ICF, EMCC and AC accredited. I'm currently working towards the ILM 7 Diploma for Senior Level and Executive Coaching and will be EMCC qualified on completion, seeking accreditation both with IFC and EMCC further down the line.

How do I know you’re the best coach for me?
You don’t - not initially, anyway. I’ve explained a little about my background in the About Me section and I’m adding some information about my values / personality below to give you an idea. Like many coaches, I offer a free non-obligation discovery (also known as chemistry) conversation that helps you establish whether I'm a good fit - if I’m not the best coach for you, I can to put you in touch with one of my fellow coaches who may suit you better.

My Values [based on 9 Shalom Schwartz Core Values report]

→Relationships - caring for others, enabling deep connections; compassion to manage situations with respect and understanding of feelings.
→Universalism - able to consider things from multiple perspectives to bring about a balanced outcome; interested in forward progression of humanity and society; acting in a way that is aligned to a sense of purpose and ethics.
→Self-Direction - creative and recognising perspectives that others may miss; great at developing new ideas and challenging existing norms and behaviours to encourage others to find a better way forward.

My Personality [based on 16Personalities and StandOut Reports

→Consul - a talent for making people feel supported, cared for and secure; a clear moral compass, good at creating and maintaining a secure, stable and friendly environment; as a team leader, someone who finds ways to make everyone feel involved, uniting people in order to get things done.
→Pioneer - by nature, an explorer, intrigued by the unfamiliar; welcoming ambiguity and with it, the risk; a resourceful person, leading teams into the undiscovered territories.
→Equaliser - a level-headed person, driven to keep the balance and keeping things aligned, often acting as ‘conscience’; consistent, holding people together, building trust easily; good at providing clarity, weighing things up to get a strong sense of "what is the right thing to do" in any situation.

What kind of coaching do you offer?
I work as an executive and leadership coach, mainly working with founders and leaders in technology startups and SMEs, women in leadership, new and emerging leaders, people working in People/Talent (HR) teams and anyone else who subscribes to Brene's Brown definition of leadership (where leader is defined as anyone - at any level - who takes responsibility for finding a potential for people and processes and has the courage to develop that potential). I work with clients on specific challenges around shifting mindsets and provide some career coaching too - due to my professional background as a senior People/HR Leader, these are the areas I have depth of knowledge around and clients frequently seek my support with.

What is your coaching style?
My style is relaxed, warm, honest and straightforward - I'll hold space for you to do your best thinking, and employ a number of coaching techniques to help you uncover things that may be holding you back and find new perspectives and ways forward along the way. I’m not afraid to make an observation or challenge if I feel it would be useful to you and your growth and I aim to hold things lightly, inserting humour and joy into our sessions where I can.

When coaching, I'll use a number of recognised and tested coaching techniques rooted in Transactional Analysis, Neuro Linguistic Programming, CBC and more. We'll work on things like values and beliefs, emotions, mindsets and more. We'll set tangible goals and I'll help you work towards them, facilitating the sessions, holding the agenda and helping you hold yourself accountable as we move along. I'll be your cheerleader and your accountability buddy all in one. We may do some visualisation work to dig deeper or work with simple coaching techniques to come to the root of the problem and identify ‘the gap’ swiftly and efficiently.

Throughout the process, I'll support you to take action and give you tools for when the coaching ends.

Where do the sessions take place?
I tailor the setup to you - while some clients prefer a video call (I use Google Meets), I'm increasingly finding that a lot of clients tend to opt for an audio call, finding this approach more valuable due to fewer distractions and increased ability for 'deeper thinking'. We'll agree on a preferred way of working in our discovery call - we can also try a few things out and see what works best.

What does a typical session look like?
I open the session by asking you what you'd like to explore, talk or think about. So that our time is optimised and productive, we'll aim to define a clear outcome which we'll revisit throughout the session(s). In sessions, we may work on the overarching goal or we may explore whatever feels most pressing to you at that moment - sometimes, this might be a bigger, longer-term topic and other times, it might be something more specific that came up in between sessions. I fully adjust to your needs - these sessions are about you, and for you. We may conclude our session by defining next steps. I will keep time so that you can relax into the session and I tend to take notes too - these are for my own records and recollection only. The sessions are completely confidential, unless there's a clear risk to yourself or someone else.

How frequent are the sessions?
My recommended cadence is somewhere between fortnightly to monthly, but but ultimately the decision lies with you - we can work around whatever suits you best, providing availability.

Are the coaching packages payable up front?
Yes - with payment plans available where required. I'll invoice you once we agree on the engagement - this is typically during or after the free exploratory chemistry session.

I can't afford the fees right now!
It's important to me that my coaching is accessible to all - to enable this, I offer pro-bono coaching regularly to anyone who finds the price point a blocker. Please get in touch if you're on parental leave, unemployed or similar.