Frequently Asked Questions

Working with an International Certified Coach, involves partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process, inspiring them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The coaching process involves collaborating to support the client in achieving their goals. It requires building trust through a regular cadence of confidential conversations. The client's role involves setting goals and bringing any challenges to the coaching conversations to discuss. The International Coaching Federation describes professional coaching as a relationship where the "coach honors the client as the expert in his or her life and work and believes every client is creative, resourceful and whole." Standing on this foundation, the coach’s responsibility is to:

• Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve,
• Encourage client self-discovery,
• Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies, and
• Hold the client responsible and accountable.

This process helps clients dramatically improve their outlook on work and life while improving theirleadership skills and unlocking their potential.

There arecoaches who specialize in all areas. However, coaches typically fall into one of two overarching categories: life and business. Within those categories, there are coaches in the fields of leadership, health and wellness, interpersonal relationships, strategic planning, career/job planning, personal development, team coaching, and communications skills. PowerUp Leadership focuses on leadership and workplace issues.

Coaching requires the client to reflect on their beliefs, behaviours, and hidden assumptions. For a client to get as much value as possible from coaching it is important that between sessions they:

• Commit time and energy to the process and be open to the coaching process,
• Tap into their strengths to overcome limitations to develop their own approach to winning,
• Focus on one’s self; the tough questions, the hard truths and one’s success,
• Observe the behaviors and communications of others,
• Be bold and take decisive actions, even if it is uncomfortable and requires rising above personal insecurities to reach one's goals,
• Listen to one’s intuition, assumptions, judgments, and to the way one sounds when one speaks,
• Challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and develop new ones that serve one’s goals in a superior way, and
• Show compassion for one’s self while learning new behaviors and experiencing challenges, and to show compassion for others as they do the same.

The International Coaching Federation defines the roles of the coach and the client as follows:

The Coach:

• Provides objective observations fostering the individual or team’s self-awareness and awareness of others,
• Actively listens to understand the individual or team’s circumstances,
• Acts as a sounding board in exploring possibilities and implementing thoughtful planning and decision making,
• Advocates and encourages the client to stretch to fully tap into personal strengths andaspirations,
• Fosters shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives,
• Challenges blind spots to illuminate new possibilities and support the creation of alternative scenarios, and
• Maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession’s code of ethics

The Client:

• Creates the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful coaching goals,
• Uses assessments and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others,
• Envisions personal and/or organizational success,
• Assumes full responsibility for personal decisions and actions,
• Uses the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives,
• Takes courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations,
• Engages big-picture thinking and problem-solving skills, and
• Takes the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by the coach to engage in effective forward actions.

Based on the ICF Global Coaching Study by Price Waterhouse Coopers the return on investment from coaching is seven times the initial investment, with more than a quarter of clients reporting an ROI of 10to 49 times. The tangible and intangible impacts of coaching are summarized below: