It happened by accident in 1996. At the time I was running a marketing agency one of my clients whose knowledge of marketing was really weak was driving me mad.
I searched high and low for a training course that would fill the gaps in his knowledge, but without success. Then, on the spur of the moment, I offered to “tutor” him myself. To my surprise he accepted.
The process of teasing out what he didn’t know and filling in the gaps, turned out to be great fun and very rewarding. I was hooked on helping people to learn and make changes.
Next I took a course in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). I wanted to take advantage of the large toolkit of techniques for enabling people to make changes in their lives.
I later went on to get my Masters, the top qualification in NLP, because the more I worked with people the more I appreciated the value of NLP’s foundations in the knowledge of what actually works.
For me the best thing about coaching is that it is based on a relationship that’s tailored to the client’s needs. My role is to help clients formulate goals that they can see are achievable and then help them make lasting changes.
Every day in a coach’s life is different. In a typical day I could be working on issues like confidence, anger management, fear of flying, lack of fulfilment, a bullying boss, low self-esteem, a feeling of being overwhelmed, career change, or using the Law of Attraction to find a new partner.
An HR manager client, really believed that she could make a difference. She’d passed all the CIPD exams but self-image was poor. So, whilst part of her believed she could do it another side of her believed that she was unworthy. This failure to deliver to her obvious potential was driving her boss mad. Happily she no longer drives her boss mad and now walks around the workplace with a huge grin on her face.
Another client suffered from low self-esteem and dislike of his job. He could see no value in his life. Nothing seemed to give him any sense of fulfilment. It turned out he had a wonderful sense of humour and great comic timing. He is now an actor.
