Frequently Asked Questions
The goal of Life Coaching is to address personal goals, aspirations and relationships and how they work in a person’s life. The key is to discover which obstacles the client should overcome and which paths will lead them to their own success.
The main goal of executive coaching is to work with companies’ upper management to improve their leadership skills, performance strategies and different methods of stakeholder management and employee engagement.
A life coach (personal strategist, self-help guru, etc.) does not act as a therapist or health care provider. Psychological intervention lies outside the scope of life coaching (from both training and licensing perspectives).
Life coach helps client to achieve goals in both professional and personal life, so the client can benefit from better organization, improved decision-making skills and even boosted confidence.
Cognitive bias occurs when our expectations and perceptions influence our evaluation of information. For example:
- Confirmation Bias: involves only seeing evidence that confirms what you already believe in or seeing evidence as confirming your existing beliefs.
- Framing Bias: involves being influenced by the way the information is presented. For example, you are about to estimate your chances to win the lottery: ninety nine percent of the population would never win the lottery vs. one percent of the population can win the lottery.
- Anchoring Bias: our minds tend to base further judgements on the first piece of information we receive.
- Availability Heuristic (shortcut in your mind): is the tendency to rely more on information which can be easily retrieved from memory. We tend to ignore what is not apparent to our minds.
- False Consensus Bias: we are influenced by the availability heuristic and often assume that others have the same perspective on something that we have.
Mentoring is the act of guiding, counseling and supporting. Mentoring is more voluntary in nature and is less formal than coaching. The mentor and protégé endeavor on a broad development goal (e.g. becoming a leader).
- Setting performance targets:
It is essential to establish the goal and objectives, as well as to create a guideline or action plan to reach them.
- Developing and maintaining vision:
The vision can make the client’s wants and goals become more definite and more long-term. A coach should provide guidance and emotional support, a confidence booster, but should not tell client what and how to do things. A coach should give the client what they need to succeed on their own.
- Coping with pressure and stress:
A coach examines the client’s life helping understand why the client feels this way, the client’s stress threshold and triggers finding tools and techniques to handle the client’s stress and pressure.
- Maintaining motivation/lack of commitment:
For many people their own worst enemy is a lack of motivation and commitment. It is difficult to remain on track with the self-motivation. Tips to stay motivated: take small steps; make reasonable, obtainable goals, write them down; reward yourself; don’t be afraid to ask for help. It is important for people to find meaning and purpose in their plans to change and take action.
- Understanding the core problem, identifying gaps and risks.
- Understanding the specifics of existing work, family, etc., environments.
- Creating clear goals/targets and interim objectives.
- Developing implementation strategy and tactics, identifying milestones.
- Accumulating required resources.
- Establishing implementation schedule/timeline.
- Tracking progress: identifying challenges and discussing accomplishments.
- Adjusting/optimizing goals/targets and objectives along with implementation tactics and related timelines.