Frequently asked questions

There isn’t one single agreed definition of coaching, which can sometimes lead to confusion. However, most professional coaching bodies share some core principles:

• It’s a non-clinical, future-focused partnership between the coach and the client.

• It helps you reach your potential through reflection, learning, growth, and positive behaviour change.

• It’s goal-oriented and solution-focused, designed to help you move forward.

People usually come to coaching when they want something to change — perhaps they’re at a transition point in life, have an important decision to make, or a meaningful goal to achieve.

A coach helps you explore different possibilities, gain clarity and take action.

In short, coaching takes you from where you are now to where you want to be.

A coaching conversation is an intentional one.

It involves active listening and powerful questioning by the coach, held in a reflective space for you. It’s not about the coach providing the answers, but helping you dig deep to discover what matters most.

This enables you to work on what is important to you and find the solutions that work for you.

My primary focus in coaching is in the workplace - working with leaders and professionals to elevate their performance and effectiveness.

However, I'm also very conscious that our professional lives don't exist in a bubble. They're also impacted by what's going on in our personal lives, our wellbeing and other people. That's why I adopt a holistic approach and hold the space for my coachees to talk about anything that they need to.

I use a blend of established coaching techniques, coaching psychology and positive psychology.

Coaching can help you to improve in most aspects of skills, performance and development. However, if you'd like to do a deep dive into any of the below areas, I've got some specific evidence-based tools and techniques that can help you.

• Behaviour change (assessing change-readiness and making change happen)

• Confidence (and understanding the difference between self-confidence, self-efficacy and self-esteem)

• Comparing yourself to others (social comparison theory)

• Decision making (beyond making a pro's and con's list - using a blend of system 1 and system 2 thinking)

• Emotional intelligence (understanding our own feelings and those of others)

• Finding meaning or purpose

• Goal-setting (and goal-getting)

• Imposter syndrome

• Leadership development

• Mindset (adopting a growth mindset)

• Motivation (self-determination theory)

• Perfectionism

• Procrastination

• Stress and resilience

• Wellbeing (using positive psychology)

In counselling and therapy, the focus tends to be on looking at the past. Coaching is about looking to the future.

Unlike counselling, coaching is a non-therapeutic intervention and is aspirational, not remedial. The goal of a counsellor or therapist is to take you from feeling dysfunctional to functional.

The goal of a good coach is to take your from surviving to thriving.

Coaching and mentoring are similar in lots of ways but mentoring involves giving lots of advice and guidance. Mentoring is usually career-related but coaching can be much broader than this.

In coaching, the coach asks a lot of questions to draw out the answers. However in consulting, the client is told what to do.

However, as a coach, I believe that my experience of something will be very different to yours and therefore I won’t impose this on you. While I may use my knowledge, skills and experience as a foundation, I will always try to guide you to find the solution that works best for you.

To get the best results from coaching, you need to come with an open mind and a willingness to reflect, learn and act.

Coaching works best when you take ownership of your progress and stay committed to putting your insights into practice.

In the very first instance, we'll have a 30 minute chat about what brings you to coaching, what you want to achieve and to give you the opportunity to ask any questions. This is completely free as the purpose is to gauge if we're a good fit for each other, if coaching is the right thing for you and discuss how we might work together. You might hear these called discovery calls, chemistry conversations or connection calls.

If we decide to proceed, we'll have a separate discussion (this can be via email) to establish the terms of how we'll work together (e.g. format of sessions, payment, confidentiality etc). Once this agreement has been reviewed, agreed and signed, we'll make a booking for the first session and I'll send you a questionnaire to help you to start thinking a little deeper.

The focus of our session(s) is completely down to you. My aim is to ask you the right questions to enable you to think about things in more detail and also ensure that we're on track with your goals.

At about halfway through the coaching journey and at the end, I'll ask you to complete a very brief questionnaire about how you're finding things. This is to ensure that we're on the right track and you're getting the absolute most from coaching with me!

The coaching industry is, sadly, unregulated. This means that anyone can call themselves a coach and offer their services to clients.

While there are many people doing good work in this domain, it's important to shop around for a coach to find the right fit for you both professionally and personally.

For me, I'd be asking a potential coach what their qualifications are and - crucially - how they practice ethically and keep their practice up to date. I'd also like to know about their accreditation (membership of a formal organisation and meeting set standards) and if they access supervision (meeting with a supervisor to reflect on their work in order to do it better).

As a practicing coach I subscribe to the global code of ethics and standards of behaviour laid out by the EMCC (European Mentoring and Coaching Council). These can be found at: www.globalcodeofethics.org/.

Check out this great article from Psychology Today which explains how coaching works through development of Psychological Capital.

If you want to take a deeper dive, this article from the British Psychological Society goes into more detail.

There are various definitions of coaching psychology however the majority have the following in common:

• The application of psychological approaches

• The enhancement of life experience or work performance

• The enhancement of wellbeing

Coaching psychology covers a broad spectrum of psychologically-based coaching approaches including (but not limited to):

• Behavioural (how behaviour affects growth) e.g. using the GROW model

• Cognitive behavioural (identifying and challenging negative thought pattern and beliefs and replacing them with positive ones) e.g. using Ellis' ABC model

• Humanistic (focusing on the whole person and their potential) e.g. Motivational Interviewing

• Existential (exploring deeper life meaning, purpose and values) e.g. Gestalt

• Being-focused (enhancing self-awareness and the connection between mind and body) e.g. Somatic coaching

• Constructive (exploring how we construct meaning and reality) e.g. Neuro-Linguistic Programming - NLP and Solution-focused coaching

• Systemic (examining the broader systems - i.e. family, workplace - in which we operate) e.g. Transactional Analysis

Before answering this, it might be helpful to do a quick recap of what positive psychology actually is...

Positive psychology is a relatively new field of psychology - introduced by Martin Seligman in late 1990s. Rather than traditional psychology which focuses on problems (e.g. alleviation of suffering to cure individuals), positive psychology instead focuses on what is going well and how to increase wellbeing and happiness in order to help people to flourish.

If we imagine a scale that ranges from minus 5 to plus 5 (with a 0 in the middle), traditional psychology usually sits in the minus 5 to 0 range. However, the absence of ill health does not therefore mean optimal health - and this is where positive psychology comes in.

However, positive psychology doesn’t just focus on purely positive experiences, neglecting or invalidating negative ones. This is the domain of toxic positivity. Instead, positive psychology recognises that there are challenges in life and by having the (science-backed) tools to deal with these, it gives us a bit of scaffolding to support us when things go wrong. Positive psychology can be used by everybody whether they experience mental ill health or not.

Positive psychology is also an applied science so rather than just relying on theory, it involves the use of empirically-validated interventions to enhance wellbeing and happiness.

How are coaching psychology and positive psychology linked?

Coaching psychology and positive psychology are closely linked in a few ways.

To begin with, coaching psychology can be, in and of itself, described as an applied positive psychology as it involves the use of established psychological approaches and is the systematic application of behavioural science in the enhancement of life experience, work performance and wellbeing for individuals, groups and organisations (APS, 2016).

Additionally, coaching psychology and positive psychology have the shared aim of 'maximising optimal human functioning' (Panchal et al., 2019).

So what is positive psychology coaching?

However, positive psychology coaching is a specific branch of coaching psychology. It's closely linked to the Constructivist tradition (the belief that people construct their own understanding and knowledge through experience, reflection and action - in other words, knowledge can't be absorbed passively) and is a solution-focused form of coaching. Positive psychology coaching focuses on the existing skills, strengths, knowledge and experience of the coachee and encourages the coachee to extend their sense of growth along a future dimension (Palmer and Whybrow, 2019).

Just as positive psychology is evidence-based, positive psychology coaching is a similarly scientifically rooted approach, informed by the theories and research of positive psychology to help coachees increase their wellbeing, enhance and apply their strengths, improve performance and achieve valued goals.

Am I a positive psychology coach?

That really depends... A recent systematic review by Llewellyn et al. (2020) provided an overview of what constitutes a positive psychology coaching session and a suggested framework for application.

As my coaching covers a wide-range of areas and focuses on what's important for you, it doesn't follow this model prescriptively. However, given my qualifications in positive psychology, I would say that I view things through a positive psychology lens. This means that I: follow the science, have the evidence-based tools to help you, am a big advocate for using strengths and - while I don't guarantee improved wellbeing or happiness as an outcome of coaching with me - it's likely that this will be a natural by-product of our work together.