About Coaching

What is possibility coaching?

Possibility Coaching is a powerful, collaborative process for transformation.  It’s all about discovering what is possible for one’s life—and then going to work!  The benefits of our working together include greater self-awareness and confidence, new life strategies, and effective new tools for personal growth.

How does it work?

• Life coaching is a both a process and a support system.
• We meet on a regular basis to discover your best strategies and go to work on challenges that you feel need to be addressed.
• It’s about learning and practice, feedback and encouragement, and more.
• You will learn how to overcome barriers to change.
• It takes personal commitment and showing up consistently, with curiosity and openness.

What is the goal of coaching?

My goal in coaching is to help you build inner resources for skillful and transformative change.  The aim to support your efforts in living the desired changes, right away—and for the long-term—to ensure they are lasting.

The work can mean many things:

• Exploring, finding, and taking the power out of limiting beliefs or thoughts that have been barriers to change.
• Recognizing strengths and growing them.
• Getting connected to your deepest truths, and “internal GPS” (our innate, built-in “compass,”) to take actions aligned with what matters most.
• Stepping out of old thinking patterns and related behavior, to feel more and more like your true and authentic self!

The nitty-gritty:  We explore what is not working.  I tailor our coaching to help you learn to deal effectively with what cannot be changed or replace it with what works.  You experience the positive results, small and large, in daily life.  Life coaching also opens up thinking to consider previously unexplored possibilities, to find the best pathway to realizing big dreams!

Coaching work can feel more like play—and that’s a good thing!  Be ready to have fun, experience insights, take powerful actions, and feel better about your life, from the first session.

Possibility Coaching will stay with you, after our coaching work is completed; you will come away from coaching with a full array of strategies, tools, and self-coaching skills that you will have, always.

We will meet in 60-minute sessions, as frequently as we agree.

Coaching FAQ’s

How do we meet?

I work with English-speaking people, by phone (or other platforms) at times that work well for the client, even when time zones are different.

What happens between sessions?

For between sessions, I’ll help you determine, or I can suggest, possible actions you can take or practice, to expand on the work done in each session.

There is gentle accountability and follow-up, in the next session.

Very important, too:  If one tool doesn’t work, we learn from this and try new approaches.  And we celebrate wins!

How is coaching different from counseling?  How are they similar?

Counseling’s focus is on problems in daily functioning, like depression or anxiety; or a client’s big, difficult situation, like loss and grief.  Clients are suffering in some way when they come to counseling.

So counseling’s purpose is to help them overcome a serious life problem, improve their functioning in a specific area or areas, heal from past trauma, recover from a loss, or deal with a significant mental illness.

Coaching serves a client well when they already are functioning ok and seeking growth or some kind of change in life.  Read on for more.

Both coaching and counseling, in their own ways, provide help to the client to create powerful shifts in their life.  Both coaching and counseling build on the client’s strengths, teach new tools, and tap their hard-earned personal resources.  The intended results of each are to open new possibilities and help the client create greater life satisfaction.

The Focus of Coaching

Coaching’s focus is on changes the client may want to make, or life goals.  The purpose of coaching is to amplify what is going well, too.  There is a big focus on skills development, to help the client work toward these aims.

People who seek coaching may be described in one or more of these ways.  They:

• Are functioning well, in general, but they may have low satisfaction in some area of their life.
• May have an issue that is keeping them stuck and they want to move forward.
• Want to gain fresh perspective or get clear on a challenging work or relationship situation and resolve it.
• May be seeking support, and a new sense of direction and confidence, as they contemplate a transition in or out of the status quo, or when moving through a major life change.

About Working with a Life Coach who is also a Counselor

I am a licensed, trained, and experienced counselor.  I bring 10+ years of private practice experience, and before that, graduate training, an internship, and 3,000 post-graduate hours of training and counseling.  Each year I complete professional continuing education courses.

I provide the deep listening that many coaching clients tell me they have never experienced before.  Counselor skills, like deep listening, applied to the coaching process, can amplify and expand the benefits.

I bring additional, advanced counselor knowledge to coaching.  For example, I am attuned to the client in a way that allows me to detect sometimes-subtle, underlying problems that may contribute to difficulty in meeting a goal.

I help the client to address such issues, and properly advise, if there is a concern, on how and where to seek help—this can and does happen sometimes in coaching.  With everyday, milder concerns, like normal yet distressing anxiety, I can help the client to deal with these nonclinical issues in coaching.

Finally, when you’re working with a licensed mental health professional as a coach, you can trust the coaching process to be safe, confidential, and ethical.

My core message to you about Possibility Coaching:

The most important thing I can say is two things… YOU CAN MAKE CHANGES, for example:

• grow a core of calm strength and resilience
• discover your best new life direction
• work in new ways with issues like being overweight or a relationship challenge
• deepen your day-to-day well-being and life satisfaction
• create the exciting results of your dreams, like writing a book or becoming an entrepreneur

AND MAKING CHANGES LIKE THESE DOES NOT HAVE TO BE DIFFICULT.

Now, more than ever in history, and more than we ever before realized, we have to ability to shape our lives—and the sciences of psychology, neuroscience, and other fields have provided the tools and how-to’s.  I bring these to our coaching work.