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Questions You May Have....
What is Coaching?
Coaching is a process which helps you to enrich and lead your life better.
It helps you by evaluating what you are doing now in your life in the light of your life dreams, goals and intentions. It gives you new choices and leads to transformation. Coaching helps you to go beyond the mental blocks of what you thought was possible.
What are the benefits of coaching?
For your organization, coaching is a long-term investment in higher business performance and in fact the most cost effective way of getting higher performance from key individuals.
Investing in coaching is great evidence of your company’s commitment to developing its people and its contribution to a supportive organizational culture with high morale.
The three main benefits of coaching for your company are:
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Building a strong managerial team who can take care of the end to end operations flawlessly
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Increasing your team's engagement and productivity level
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Retaining your key team members and avoid the cost of new hiring, and onboarding
For you as an individual, coaching will help you to become crystal clear about what you want in this life and go after it with passion through the support and wisdom of your personal coach.
Through coaching, you will finally give that dream of yours a chance to come to life. As you already illustrated a clear strategy together with your coach on how to achieve your goal, you are saving significant time and having a much higher chance of success.
Achieving your career goals makes you more confident and fulfilled, as well as providing you with more financial security. This will open new doors in other dimensions of your life to live life at your own terms.
How do I know that Dr. Maria is the best coach for me?
We will let Dr. Maria answer this question from her personal experience as a coachee.
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I have had the honor of working with more than 15 coaches since 2005. These coaches helped me in different areas of my life such as:
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Presentation and Public Speaking
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Career Transition
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Dating and Love
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Meditation and Spirituality
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Investment
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Entrepreneurship
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Health and Fitness
For me whenever I need a new coach, I do my research on Google and Linkedin and make a list of potential coaches that could help me. I then check these coaches website and Linkedin profile and search for:
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The coach is successful in the very field he/she is coaching, for example, for a career coach I searched for someone who had a versatile and successful career before becoming a coach rather than being in being in the same role for most of his/her professional life.
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I then check their website for a structured approach, although I am a big believer in bespoke coaching, the coach should provide some sort of structure on what to expect in coaching series.
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I then book a complimentary call with him/her. For me the call must be with the coach who I am going to work with in future and not with a sales representative, if that is the case, I don't go for coaching with them.
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During my complimentary call I share my goal and aspirations with the coach and ask some questions on how he/she could help me. For me, chemistry and my gut feeling plays a much bigger role than the coach's methodology. If I have a good feeling during that call, it is always a good sign that this is going to be a successful and transformative series.
What coaching methodology do you use?
Dr. Maria uses a combination of techniques which she learned from coaching giants such as Tony Robbins, Marshall Goldsmith, Rich Litivin and Brene Brown.
Here is a short list of some of the methods she uses:
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RPM Model,
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GROW model,
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ACHIEVE model,
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OSKAR model,
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Action-Centric Leadership model,
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Transformational Leadership model
Each model has its pros and cons and works best for certain situations. Having been working with all these models for years, Dr. Maria believes there is NO best model of coaching, the best result is only achieved by mutual commitment and work from both the coach and the coachee.
Dr. Maria is also a big believer in using and sharing her personal experience with her coachees whenever appropriate. She truly believes that the client sometimes benefits the most when they see how she overcame a similar situation and what kind of techniques she used to build her dream career and life.
What kind of qualifications Dr. Maria has that makes her a great coach?
Coaching is a relatively new industry which is not well regulated yet, which means unfortunately anyone can take a weekend workshop and claim that he/she is a coach!
The highest standard available nowadays for coaching is an ICF certification. When a coaching institute is ICF certified, it means the ICF reviewed that institute's coaching program to ensure:
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The program is taught by industry leaders in that field with extensive (usually more than 10 years) working experience in that area of coaching.
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The program covers all essential subjects of coaching such as goal setting, deep listening, critical thinking, strategic planning, etc.
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The coachees need to practice around 100-300 hours of practical coaching experience during the program to be able to graduate successfully.
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The coachees must learn their material rigorously and prove their capabilities by passing several written assessments and providing successful case studies.
Much more than having a coaching certification, we think it is crucial that the coach has a demonstrated success record in his/her coaching speciality. You can check Dr. Maria's success record in both career and business and team leadership in her Linkedin profile.
What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?
A mentor is a senior person in the business who guides a junior person from their greater experience. A coach on the other hand does not have to be a senior person in the client’s line of business. It is the client who knows his/her business the best, not the coach.
Many of our clients already have a mentor in the workplace or in their friendship circle when they come to me. In fact, we are a big fan of having a coach and a mentor, and working with both if using them appropriately.
We think you get the best result and an amazing career acceleration when you use the mentor for:
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Getting to know your company's decision makers traits and behaviors
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Becoming familiar with your company's politics and how to handle them the best way
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Understanding your company's unwritten rules, especially the unwritten do's and don'ts
And use your coach for (if you are a manager):
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Finding your personal and unique style of leadership
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Sharing your honest opinion about your team and company and establish yourself as a 'go to person' for your team and your company's C level stakeholders
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Build astounding confidence and thought leadership and prompt your career to the next level
And if you are an individual contributor (i.e. you are not managing others), use your coach to:
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Find your real purpose and passion which might be completely different to what you are doing now
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Make a strategic plan with your coach and start building your dream career while working at your current position
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Identify and overcome your psychological barriers and achieve your goal in a shorter amount of time
What is the difference between coaching and therapy/counselling?
Counselling and therapy are to remedy the client’s problems. The client goes to therapy or counselling because they feel dissatisfied with their life and want relief from psychological and/or physical symptoms.
They want to get away from pain or discomfort rather than move towards desired goals.
Hence therapy and counselling often seek to understand the past and what went wrong in order to feel and do better in the present. Coaching on the other hand focuses on the present and future. A coach may work with a client who already has an OK life, but wants to make it even better and make it an extraordinary life.
Can coaching create dependency?
Definitely not!
A great coach wants the client to be autonomous and achieve what they want. He/she makes it clear from the first session that the client is responsible for, and owns the results of the coaching. Coaching works to make the client more self reliant, not less so.
How many coaching sessions will I need?
Our experience with numerous clients in the past shows that you need a certain amount of time and commitment to make your dream come true.
Nothing can be gained for free on this planet. There is no one night success.
Our experience shows that 3 months is the optimum time period for a dedicated professional to achieve
his/her goals, that's why we offer our packages for a period of 3 months.
We have seen some clients achieve their goals during the first 3 months, we celebrated their triumph and moved on with our lives knowing that we can always work together when they are ready to elevate their career and life to the next level again.
Others have needed a further 3 months and we ended up working together for 6 months in total.
Many factors play key roles in the time it takes for clients to achieve their goals.
The first and foremost is a client's readiness and commitment level, however goal ambitiousness, and home situation and time availability also play significant roles.