Personal Coaching: Your Path To Corporate And Personal Success

Much has been said about the importance of setting goals to achieve results. That’s where clarity, goals, and balance come in, because all of these elements contribute to optimum performance, and the ability to get what you really want out of life. A personal coach will help you set the best goals for your situation.

The role of a personal coach is to help individuals clarify their thinking, set and achieve their goals, realize their dreams, and create balance in their lives. Hiring a personal coach to help identify and achieve desired results is a relatively new phenomenon. There are now approximately one hundred personal coaches in the Greater Vancouver area, up from a handful in 1998.

The personal coach is a facilitator, not a therapist. A therapist treats disorders with remedial or rehabilitative processes that focus on the past, while coaches look to the future to maximize the potential that exists within each client. A coach can serve as a trusted confidant who is always there for you.

The personal coach doesn’t give you an advice. Instead, personal coaching helps the client identify what he or she most wants to be or do and helps them build on their strengths and create a plan of action. We’re always more committed to a plan of action we ourselves have created, compared to a plan that someone else created.

One of the best way to ensure positive results is to install accountability. The best way to do this is to have an outsider regularly assess your progress. Studies have shown that while only one in five people who start exercise programs reach their goals, the vast majority of them had a coach to provide advice and progress reports.

Personal coaching can be useful for anyone who has unachieved goals and wants to maximize his potential. Nearly every professional athlete has a coach, and now more and more executives and professionals have them as well. Many human resource management strategies at large corporation make extensive use of coaching to help their employees perform better.

The coach will do questions like this: What’s the biggest challenge you have? What do you really want? What are you merely tolerating? What manageable steps would help you to achieve your goals? Personal coaching may involve homework and exercises, and your coach will seek a response.

We all know that goal setting is important to achieve results in life. Personal coaching allows you to clarify your thoughts so that you can set reasonable goals. There is a large and growing market for personal coaches. They differ from therapists in that they focus on the future instead of the past. They don’t focus on giving advice but on building on strengths. It has been shown that third parties can help people succeed in reaching their goals. Coaches will want to help you ask the right questions about your life. They are considered a major part of modern human resource management.

- George Purdy