Coaching
About Coaching
Research shows that health and wellness coaching provides more than guidance, it creates a supportive partnership that helps people navigate illness, loss, and major life changes with greater confidence.
Coaching builds self-efficacy, reduces feelings of isolation, and improves quality of life by focusing on small, achievable goals, coping strategies, and reclaiming personal identity.
While medical care is essential for treatment and management, its structure often leaves little space for extended conversation. Coaching complements that care by offering time and support for reflection, validation, and action—empowering clients to move forward on their own terms.
Partnership
Coaching is a process and partnership that allows you to accelerate forward, especially when you’ve been stuck. By realigning your momentum, your life becomes easier, more peaceful and more fulfilling. A coach won’t tell you what to do or give you all the answers. A coach is objective, non-judgmental, an excellent listener, and helps you uncover the strategies and steps forward that will work best for you.
You might think of coaching like going on a road trip with a supportive passenger riding along with you. You are in control of the car and where it’s going – the same way you’re in control of your life, your destiny, your decisions, your future. As you drive, your coach accompanies you, assisting you on your journey to reach your destination.
When you partner with a coach, you are in the driver’s seat. Your coach provides support for accountability and self-awareness and helps you gain new perspectives. Coaches ask questions not to get an answer they desire, but to encourage you in meaningful exploration that can help you reach a new level of depth and performance. As a client, you are responsible for the commitment to achieve your chosen action steps and for your own success.
The Coaching Relationship
A coaching relationship can be a powerful experience, involving the development of new possibilities, new levels of achievement and personal growth. The coaching relationship between the coach and the client is founded upon mutual trust and respect. The central focus of the coaching relationship is the well-being of the client.
Fundamental to a successful coaching experience is learning. The coach supports the client in reaching the desired outcome of the client. The coach supports the client in exploring new ways to view situations, individuals, and possibilities and in developing new approaches, plans, strategies and actions. This innovation involves learning. At times, the learning may be challenging. There may be times when the learning involves new discoveries about the way an individual’s own actions play a part in situations the individual wishes to change. This type of self-discovery can at times be uncomfortable.
All coaching conversations are confidential, and the coach will not voluntarily divulge information about a coaching relationship without the written or verbal permission of the client, as per the International Coach Federation (ICF) Code of Ethics.
What Coaching is NOT
Coaching is not the same thing as mentoring or therapy. A mentor provides subject matter expertise, wisdom and guidance based on their own experiences. Therapy deals with healing pain, trauma, dysfunction or conflict of some kind, typically with the goal of resolving difficulties that impair an individual’s emotional health and psychological functioning.
By contrast, coaching focuses on facilitating individuals or groups to draw upon their own experiences and capabilities to set and reach their own objectives. The coach is the expert in the coaching process, but you are the expert on your life journey.
*PERMISSION FOR USE PROVIDED BY CANADA COACH ACADEMY
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