Executive Life Coaching
Working with an executive life coach has become a standard practice for most businesses nowadays.
A lot of people in the corporate world, especially those in business and leadership positions, already assume that having the opportunity to get executive life coaching is a great privilege.
But what kind of benefits will you get from executive coaching?
How can executive coaches help you?
What can you expect to achieve when you work with a coaching executive?
Read on to find out!
What Is An Executive Life Coach?
Most people perceive executive coaching to be the same as life coaching.
But the truth is, an executive coach is not the same as a life coach.
While both coaches offer types of services that are geared towards helping clients to achieve their full potential, an executive coach is focused on helping clients achieve professional and personal development.
The most typical clients of an executive coach are those people who have leadership roles in a company or organization and may have either formal or informal influence over the people that they are supervising, managing, or leading.
They can be people in the leadership position (e.g., CEO, supervisors, managers, departmental heads) or people who own or control their own business.
These people seek the guidance of a coach to help them make the right decisions, get professional feedback or discover leadership strategies for their career or business advancement.
On the other hand, life coaches help clients to fulfill their personal goals.
If you wish to achieve both your personal and professional development, you should work with both executive and life coaching facilitators.
4-Step Executive Life Coaching Checklist
If you have decided to retain executive life coaching services to achieve your professional and personal goals, you may be wondering how the entire coach training process goes.
Well, you have come to the right page.
In this section, I will discuss in detail how executive coaching can help you to realize your professional and sometimes personal dreams.
Below, I have listed down the steps coaching clients will have to go through in their executive life coaching sessions.
Step 1. Assessment
The first step that the executive coach will take is assessment.
This step will allow them to identify what are the possible obstacles that you will face in realizing your professional dreams and determine the factors that might be holding you back.
To do this, the coach will meet up with the client and their team (this may be comprised of the people they work with or manage, or it can be their immediate supervisor or an authority in the company’s human resources department.)
During this meeting, the coach will ask questions and listen to discussions to understand the client’s background, goals, and expected results.
Following the first meeting, the coach will have a one-on-one meeting with the client.
The purpose of this meeting is to recap the information that has been gathered during the initial meeting.
It is also during this time that expectations will be clarified.
Lastly, the coach will perform an in-depth interview to explore the client’s career, weaknesses, strengths, motivations, and goals much more deeply.
Step 2. Analysis
After gathering the much-needed data, the coach will proceed in analyzing the current state or condition of the client and determine how far they are from achieving their personal dreams.
They’ll also decide the necessary coaching strategies to get there.
By examining the developmental needs of the client, coaches will be able to create an action plan to help you get to where you want to be.
They will start by determining your priorities and identifying what items must be on your to-do list.
Another goal is to pinpoint what behavioral or professional changes are necessary to help them achieve their goals.
Once all the possible paths are laid out, you will work together to assess each available option and to pick out which of them will take you to your professional and leadership goals fastest.
At the end of this stage, you’ll have a solid coaching action plan that can be assessed and measured.
Step 3. Action
In this step, you are doing the hard work. Since you and your coach have already come up with an action plan, it’s now up to you to put the plan into action.
In short, you will focus on carrying out specific changes necessary to accomplish all the things listed in the development plan.
But of course, the coach won’t leave you behind. Throughout this stage, the client and the coach will be in constant communication with one another.
This is done to make sure that the client is doing their part and sticking to the coaching plan.
But more than that, the goal of the coach at this stage is to help the client address any specific problems that may arise at this period.
Moreover, they will be there to remind, motivate, and inspire the client to keep on going no matter how difficult things turn out to be.
Step 4. Feedback
The last and final stage of the coaching process is feedback.
Once the client, along with their team or supervisors, agrees that the process has reached the set expectations, the phase-down period will commence.
At this stage, the client will continue to execute the plan.
But this time, with decreasing supervision from the coach.
After a few weeks from the last follow-up meeting, another session will be scheduled to acknowledge the accomplishments of the process.
More than that, this meeting is focused on getting feedback.
This is important to identify the possible areas for personal improvement of the coaching process.
How Do I Choose An Executive Life Coach?
Now that you know what the coach can do for you and have already determined the necessary steps in the coaching checklist, the next thing that I want to cover is how to choose a coach.
The Factors To Consider When Choosing A Life Coach
Finding the most suitable coach for your needs will require you to consider the following essential factors:
Experience/Portfolio
One of the most important things to focus on when choosing an executive coach is their portfolio.
By doing so, you will be able to discover the results and outcomes of the coach’s process, allowing you to determine their success rate.
In addition to the success rate, the portfolio of the coach will also let you identify the functional and leadership experience of the coach.
This allows you to recognize if their personal expertise is suitable for the line of business or industry that you are in.
Process
You already have a sneak peek on what to expect during the process.
However, please keep in mind that different coaches may have their own twists or deliver add-ons to the steps that I have mentioned.
Being familiar with their process helps you to have a more realistic expectation of what your experience will be.
Compatibility
More than the professional abilities and experience of the coach, you also need to make sure that you will feel comfortable with the coaching professional enough to let your guard down and share with them all of your dreams and aspirations as well as your insecurities and issues.
Are Executive Coaches Worth It?
Executives can’t stop raving about how life coaches have helped them to achieve professional and business advancement.
The leadership and business benefits of executive coaching have been tried and tested for decades.
However, you must keep in mind that the success of the process will not just rely on the skill and experience of the coach—it will also depend on the personal commitment of the client and their organization.
So if you are ready to take serious action to create your success, then coaching is definitely worth it for you.
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