Coaching
My mission as a coach is to partner with individuals in building fulfilling purpose-driven careers, businesses, and lives. Through a generative inquiry process, we work together to maximize your personal and professional potential. We look at how you can be more effective, be more efficient, and truly embody your values through your work. Whatever your professional goals, we will work together as a team to make them a reality.
To Schedule a Coaching Session
What is Professional Coaching?
The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking, inquiry-based process. For me, coaching is a conversational process that allows individuals to work with a coach to (a) thoughtfully explore professional questions, areas of interest, and sticky issues and (b) create clarity of direction and momentum for change.
Through conversation and questioning, coaching provides an opportunity to reflect, learn, and make conscious decisions about what to do. The coaching process does not present a standard approach or a set of best practices, as if the coach were an expert with all the answers. (It’s a different approach than, say, working with a consultant who are often thought of as experts! Coaching is not about a client just taking the advice of an expert.) Instead it creates a space for you to solve your own problems and come up with your own solutions that align with your specific professional context and personal values. Coaching is about the client and the coach co-creating a pathway forward together.
A coach can be meaningful partner in exploring your professional life. A good coaching relationship can…
Create a supportive environment to go beyond just surface level self-reflection.
Provide a space for individuals to give voice feelings and thoughts that are seldom voiced and gain perspective
Can improve awareness of an individual’s blind spots.
Identify and build on an individual’s internal resources and strengths.
Create a place for exploring different approaches and scenarios.
Make you feel less lonely by providing support, empathy, and encouragement.
Create a partnership of accountability and build confidence in making bold moves.
Use small goals/accomplishments to, over time, create momentum for larger, even bolder moves.
Exercise an individual’s muscles of self-reliance and self-reflection with a goal of healthy self-management, instead of building a dependence on an outside expert.
How Does it Work?
We schedule a free 30-minute informational meeting to get to know one another and see if there’s interest in continuing with coaching sessions.
For each coaching session, you bring in a topic to discuss, maybe a challenge or an obstacle with which you’ve been struggling.
Coaching sessions last for 45-60 minutes and end with action steps to address this challenge or obstacle.
Fees for a coach of my level are typically $150-$250 per session and sold in a set of 5 sessions.
Fees can be discussed in the introductory meeting.
I take personal financial circumstances into account.
I am currently offering a pay-what-you-can pricing structure for people who work in the arts and nonprofit sector, due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Fees must be paid prior to coaching sessions.
I am accredited as an Associate Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation.
I Believe that…
People have great potential to contribute to a professional/workplace environment. I believe in having a growth mindset, that an individual’s talents can be fostered and developed through focused learning.
The coaching process creates a stronger sense of who an individual is and how you want to show up as a leader in your work.
Development includes the whole person: thoughts and feelings, head and heart. So, as a coach, I will lead conversations that examine and address the whole person.
A safe space is essential for honesty and is difficult to find for many professionals. My role as a coach is to create a welcoming and supportive space—indeed, a brave space—for professional conversations, a space that truly values trust and intimacy.
Coaching is not for everyone and not every coach will work well with every person. Prospective coaching relationships begins with a free introductory meeting where we can begin to get to know each other and build rapport. An individual can then choose to continue or take another path; there’s no fine print and no strings attached.
People learn best when development is driven from within. Therefore, the goals and direction of coaching should come from the needs of the individual. As a coach, I will remain flexible with, supportive of, and curious about the individual and not prescriptive.
Leadership can come from any part of an organization and organizational health depends on strong leadership in all positions; it is not restricted to traditional positions of seniority or authority. I enjoy work with people of all ages and experience levels and not just with executives.
Coaches don’t need subject-matter expertise to still work well with a client. However, I am acutely aware of resource disparities and economic injustice within our systems and know that arts organizations and other nonprofits—who may do great work—often do not invest a lot of resources to professional development of its staff members. While I work with individuals from all sectors, I also strongly believe in providing support to people in the arts and nonprofit sector and have a pay-what-you-can pricing structure for these individuals.
Why is Professional Coaching Important?
Let’s face it: many workplaces do not provide a lot of professional development support for its staff. So many workplaces are built on a factory mentality: we manage others, we delegate tasks, we get things done, we look at making things faster and cheaper, and we show up again to do more of the same the next day. Efficiency is a guiding principle and we often operate as cogs in the workplace machine.
But this sort of environment is not conducive to developing authentic leadership skills and too much of the machine mentality can numb your sense of mission and of your own values, skills, experience, and your evolving needs as a human being. You can get tired of work and you can lose track of why you chose to do this work in the first place.
Coaching is great tool for those people who want to step away from the perpetual production line and invest in and develop our professional selves. Instead of prizing efficiency, coaching places value in the time and space to think about our effectiveness and our impact, as well as our sense of self and our feelings about how we can authentically show up while doing this work.
We spend so much of our lives at work and I think it’s important to be mindful and make deliberate decisions about our professional lives. We need to be able to reflect on our work and exercise our analytical muscles in looking at our work. That exercise, that analytical and self-reflective work, can be done really well in a one-on-one coaching partnership.
A Personal Note About the COVID-19 Era
As we all know, the world has changed a lot with the coronavirus pandemic. It’s a time of great uncertainty about work and it has forced many of us to reconsider things that were once accepted norms. Many of us are in a strange period of reexamining what we think of as “work” and our “professions”. What is the shape of work now? How can I do my best work in this environment? How do I want to show up as a leader now? Where does work fall in my life’s priority list? Do I need to pivot and shift my role to be more fulfilling? Or do I need to pursue other work? There are so many questions about our professional lives that are floating around at this time.
I’m wondering if I can offer some assistance to you or someone you may know. Have you been curious about coaching or are looking for ways to be more effective in your professional life? Maybe there’s a challenge or an obstacle that you’ve been struggling with in your work, something you’ve been thinking about but haven’t been able to solve on your own or something on which you want another perspective? I’d love to offer my coaching services for anyone who’d like to chat. Please set up a free 30-minute informational meeting using the button at the top of the page.