An Executive Coach aims to help and encourage people to:

• develop their self-confidence
• meet personal and professional goals
• improve and explore self-worth by achieving their ambitions
• identify specific areas for personal development and then work together to meet them.

Coaching is about objectivity, structure and encouraging confidence. It does not set out to instruct, take over, or hand out advice.  It enables the client to use their own resourcefulness to create change for their own benefit.

Some specific examples:

• managing ways through everyday change, stress or conflict
• planning ones' career development
• improving performance and influence
• dealing with succession in management
• providing a sounding board

Mentoring helps people plan their long-term vision. It is not an ‘off-the-shelve’ solution but is instead shaped by the needs of the individual client and what is required to help them achieve their personal aims and specific career goals.

Frequent themes that come up for mentees:

• ‘How can I change or adapt where transition is obviously necessary?’
• ‘How can I overcome the persistent interpersonal relationship problems I find at work?’
• ‘How can I become better at inspiring, building and leading my team?’
• ‘How can I get better at business strategies?’

By employing widely tested specialist techniques that are based on proven principles, a good executive coach will mix these together with his own experience and intuition to find tailored solutions for individual needs.

The executive coach will see beyond emotional barriers and establish a future that has real opportunity and potential.

The success of Executive Coaching is based upon mutual trust and confidence in one another, combined with the need and desire of the mentee to actually achieve realistic goals. To do this the coach leads the way with a combination of:

• listening techniques to bring out the issues
• discussions to identify agreed goals and targets
• advice from the coach's own business experience
• discussion of case histories that may give insight into future strategies
• building confidence by ensuring that problems have been fully exposed and dealt with
• the setting out of priorities for the client and the creation of a road map that will lead to real progress and clear solutions.

Why Coaching?

Coaching does work, it does deliver.

It is designed to seek out the solutions and is action orientated.

It is about dealing with the present and achieving results in the future.

The results achieved can be measured and are then discussed as coaching sessions progress. To be successful, of course, coaching does require individuals to reach inside themselves to find solutions and to undertake the agreed work and thinking…this can sometimes be painful but is always illuminating and ultimately fulfilling.