Group Coaching
The Steps in Coaching
The intention of coaching is to support you in getting clear on where you want to be, or the changes you wish to make in your life. We then work together to determine the journey between where you are now and achieving your goals, and to get there. At each meeting we discuss your experience so far and what actions are needed to continue the progress towards your goals, while staying in integrity and being authentic to who you are.
Working within the safe container of a Coaching Group provides all those benefits, and also gives you the group’s support, encouragement and inspiration as we witness each group member moving towards her chosen accomplishments.
About Your Goals
Your goals may be relationship related, about a new business, improving your health, longed-for travel, or money and finances. In fact they may be anything specific and achievable that you want in your life.
At the beginning of our 5 week Coaching Group I’ll work 1:1 with you to define two goals you’re excited to achieve during the program. In our meetings we’ll use the techniques developed from my training and extensive experience, to break down your goals into the manageable action steps required to achieve them. I refer to this as fieldwork, and will encourage you to create a list of actions each week that is inspiring and fun, and that you’re excited to complete.
Increasing Self Awareness
Your own knowledge of yourself is a powerful ally, and we’ll collaborate as a group to bring that unique type of intelligence to the foreground in all the ways that can enrich how you experience your life.
With the Group’s support you’ll work towards your goals while becoming more aware of the patterns that inform your behavior, and how to use that awareness to move forward more confidently and successfully. Over time, it is this intelligence that will enable you to see more options, and have more choice in the ways that you can respond in all situations.
Self-Coaching: Skills You’ll Practice During this Program
During this group, you’ll also learn useful practical skills you can use to you coach yourself, long after this Group is complete. Some self-coaching skills are:
- Listening for possibility
- Finding support when I need it
- Being aware of resources that can help when I’m in difficulty
- Learning how my fear can help me
- Strengthening my self-compassion
- Staying awake to the options available
Interested?
How I coach
My style is perceptive, includes questioning, reflection, mirroring, affirmation of strengths and acknowledgment of challenges. I have been coaching for over 15 years, since training in Australia in 2001, and my intention is to show compassion and to nurture deeper self-love in my clients. While I pay close attention to how you can accomplish your specific goals, I am intentional about slowing down for the challenges and being present with what is true in the moment, to help you proceed with greater clarity and purpose.
The basic coaching methodology from my coach training give a solid foundation to my work, and now much of my style and many of my coaching tools and techniques, come from the Relational Gestalt Practice & Gestalt Awareness Practice I have studied over the last 10 years. I also bring in the Motivational Interviewing skills that I have recently refreshed. I’m always looking for other techniques and abilities that will make me a more effective coach. I’ll be reminding you to keep moving from general to the specific, ensuring you get the most learning about yourself from the program, and to increase your clarity and self-awareness. We’ll be listening for the resources and hidden assets in your challenges, and looking for ways you can use those to make progress easier and more fluid, now and in future.
Stumbling blocks or stepping stones
By partnering with other members of the Group and having help to pay attention to what stops you, you’ll notice patterns that emerge that could inform other situations or challenges you have experienced. Recognizing these patterns enables exploration of how they are actually assets. Rather than viewing challenges and patterns as issues to be overcome, we’ll foster a mindset of looking for ways to re-frame them from obstacles to opportunities.
Gestalt Approach
Honoring the Gestalt tradition, as the facilitator, I will make space to share, and to review and explore where you are now before we move on to where you’re going. Acknowledging your current difficulties ensures we take a closer look to clarify what’s happening, often diffusing or diluting them, enabling you to move on more easily.
This can save you expending precious energy in resistance or being stuck by the fear that might be arising. While it’s important not to minimize any challenges that arise, we’ll also be learning to listen with curiosity to one another, and to reflect what we hear and to notice the positives for one another; developing our skills of looking for other options and emerging possibilities.
Having the safety of a supportive Group, each with their own goals, to witness successes and challenges will empower you to learn more about yourself, and the ways you wish to operate in the world.
My Group Coaching pilot was amazing, and now using the feedback from the participants, I’m redesigning it and adding more features New program dates for a Santa Cruz group will be scheduled later in 2017.
If what I describe here calls to you, please get in touch