Coaching
ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.
We all have goals we want to reach, challenges we’re striving to overcome and times when we feel stuck. Partnering with a coach can change your life, setting you on a path to greater personal and professional fulfillment.
Personal Coaching
As said, coaching is a partnership with a clear goal in mind. To set clear goals you need to align your desires and intentions and focus your willpower on short or long-term actions toward achieving the said goal. As living can be a complex matter, sometimes we need outside help to find and activate our inner resources and potential. Coaching often leads to therapy and therapy to coaching — the two complement one another perfectly. When coaching, I work on building and strengthening the client’s inner authority and conscious leadership. Personal coaching helps us become our own constructive and resourceful authorities, as well as leaders who create and live creative and inclusive lives. In addition, coaching helps us align our identities, values, qualities, and resources, and to set and achieve valuable personal goals.
Business Coaching
ICF states that business coaching covers workplace coaching and is focused on the client’s professional growth. Companies and entrepreneurs often turn to business coaching when faced with business decisions or career changes, or when there is a new product or brand to be introduced. This kind of coaching is also used to help with business expansions, reorganizations, and optimizations, for strengthening and maintaining positive organizational climate and culture, and to boost team spirit (morale), business success, employee motivation, sales results, and conflict resolution — just to name a few.
Organizational coaching aims to support and ensure a positive and systematic transformation inside an organization. It is often used to help clients achieve strategic goals and advance their leadership skills, and encourage changes within the organizational culture. Coaching methods are applied at an organizational level to ensure that the potential and resources a company already has been fully realized so that problems can be solved and goals achieved.
- Develop competencies of companies’ top performers
- Prepare individuals for lateral and/or horizontal transitions
- Overcome obstacles
- Achieve goals
- Create a psychologically safe environment where it is possible to communicate, share and solve disagreements
Many leaders recognize the positive effect that coaching had on them — that it helped them get a better understanding of themselves and others, and that it affected their value system, the way they treat others, and how they looked at their own careers.
It is estimated that around 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies employ one form of coaching or another.
According to the Institute of Coaching over 70 percent of coaching clients have experienced improvement at their workplaces, and in their interpersonal relations, and it has made their communication more effective. What’s more, 86 percent of the companies believe that bringing in a coach was a wise investment on their part and that it paid off through their employees’ higher levels of productivity and happiness and overall employee retention rate (Dale Carnegie).
Coaching makes a positive impact on the entire organizational structure of a company, through personal changes those directly experiencing the techniques undergo, which spill over to their team members and then the entire business. Coaching users are better equipped to manage, inspire and motivate others, and take action.
When I’m coaching my clients I draw strength from my past — those 10 years of working as a marketing manager for various multinational companies in Croatia and abroad. When it comes to business coaching, I work with both individuals and teams, or a combination of both, as a package deal. The package structure, manner of execution, and timetable depend on the needs and availability of the clients and the ordering party.