We all need compassionate, wise guidance to successfully negotiate life. Ideally that guidance comes easily from within, but often times we need to receive it from others, skilled in the particular aspects of growth we are pursuing. Negotiating life’s inevitable challenges is so much easier when we have skilled and compassionate support. Someone who can steadfastly be with us in our vulnerability without judgement, with a desire to serve us and with some questions & suggestions that are as tough as they are kind.

Some coaches can be uncomfortable about being with people’s big emotions, fears, idiosyncratic desires and wounds, because they can be messy. The messy-ness doesn’t fit neatly into a model or personality profiling tool. Models and coaching tools are excellent ways to structure our thinking about our experience, but they can’t encompass the truth of all that you are. We are complex, wonderfully messy and reasurringly similar. Everyone is a bit weird in their own way. In my coaching sessions, its really ok to be messy whilst in the pursuit of self awareness, self regulation, resourcefulness and integrity.

Utilising the skills and principles of my profession in my own life not only deepens my understanding of those tools, it gives me a much richer understanding of what my clients experience when I ask them to face their fears, acknowledge their deepest desires or challenge old ingrained patterns of behaving in the world.

Test, test, test, is one of my mottos. It is great to have an insight (sometimes called an ‘ah ha’ or lightbulb moment) in a coaching session but that is only the beginning of the change process. Coaching not only facilitates deep insight into yourself and others, it asks, “So, now that you know, what are you going to do about it?” Action is the key that turns insights into results. It’s a process that begins with self-awareness and develops into habits of success.

If you would like to learn more about my attitudes to growth and change read my blog page.