Why Coaching?

With coaching, you don’t have to navigate life’s challenges on your own, and your Coach is in your corner to help and assist.

Take ownership of your career, business plans, leadership abilities, communication and “strategic” management. Anything that is important enough to you to make it easier, more certain and less stressful … whatever deserves your best effort, a business coach can be the answer.

Prior focus topics:

Career development — map out your career transition or advancement goals. Sometimes it helps to inventory your strengths, aptitudes, and core values to fine-tune your career trajectory. Whether a job transition or as an entrepreneur, you find new ways to reach goals and manifest visions, plans and intentions. Rise to challenges, handle obstacles, be fully in the driver’s seat.
Persuasion and Influence — Get the visibility you always wanted as you learn how to finesse situations using your authentic voice, power and influence. Make clearer agreements with others. Know where you stand. Deal with differences.
Mission & Purpose — this is also how you do your best work, when you have a clear sense of purpose, both at work and in life … making meaning is a deliberate, creative act. Why settle for being a cog in the wheel when you have so much to say about your life, your priorities, your choices?!
Leadership Development — leaders are made, not born. They lead with confidence and build up, inspire and get out of the way (formerly known as “empowerment”) so that others can do the same. What are some of the core leadership skills, capabilities (performance goals) or results you are hungry for?
Priority Management & Productivity — Increase your focus on what matters to be more “productive” as you would define your own “success.” Be accountable to yourself to accomplish more.
Strategic Planning & Management — Plan, assess, and execute complex projects while collaborating with others. This may also involve raising capital or other resources.

Coaching is …

a systematic way to effectively focus on learning, making changes, working through obstacles, and achieving desired results
a style of management based on shared power, where the “coach” holds a person accountable for the priorities and commitments they have made for themself
a practical set of interpersonal skills useful in a wide variety of situations

Coaching is NOT …

Therapy— although the process and results of coaching can be therapeutic, by contrast, most therapies focus on healing or resolving the past, while coaching examines practical actions and attitudes necessary to move forward at a new level of effectiveness

Consulting— many consultants offer coaching as an additional service, but consulting and coaching differ in that it’s the consultant’s job to provide ANSWERS and be an expert within a subject area; however, a coach facilitates DISCOVERY by assisting others in finding their own unique answers

Teaching— similar to consulting, where the consultant acts as content expert, a teacher or trainer facilitates learning in a particular subject area. A coach, however, assists others in doing whatever is necessary to reach their stated goals and get the job done. Learning occurs in both cases, however, with coaching, the “curriculum” is designed by the person being coached to meet their unique needs.

“Coaching is not just a set of tools or techniques — not fad-of-the-week `false empowerment’ — but rather it often represents a shift in assumptions….” – Daniel Robin

Our Coaching Services

As experienced coaches since the 1990s, both principals Daniel Robin & Karin Leonard have guided and assisted clients from diverse backgrounds, ages, industries, and personalities. Our training in neurolinguistics and as certified coaches means you are hiring someone who has the confidence, skills and humility to be a great ally in work or in life.

Daniel & Karin’s coaching (to facilitate the best you) and/or advisory services (added input and recommendations based on our domain experience) often lead to breakthrough results. Reaching goals becomes more systematic and less stressful. Our coaching clients report an easier ride and a greater sense of life quality while achieving at a higher level. The benefits of coaching last a lifetime.

When to use coaching versus other services | Contact us for more.

Our Coaching for Organizational Excellence

Providing an environment where people can self-manage is at the core of what people often say they want, on the one hand, in order to feel respect, dignity and some degree of autonomy. Coaching is less about giving advice and more about creating support structures that assist with doing one’s best work (see note below on this topic).

It is also true that, when someone chooses it, such as when they ask for help, they also want direct answers to questions, they want to collaborate and pool the best available ideas and diverse talents (thus they want to find out what others know, can do and perceive that they might have missed), but rarely do we want to be told what to do. Asked, invited, and reasoned with? Sure. Told? Not so much.

Leadership takes many forms, and being coached is a powerful way of leading your life. You might prefer that someone else take charge and lead through example and have great solutions to things that are not in your wheelhouse. Most of us like to take turns with leadership — a natural form of cooperation that looks like teamwork and sometimes collaboration. Coaching helps people discover how to navigate some of these tricky aspects of when to lay back and when to charge forward.

Some personality styles do NOT want to be “in charge” of someone else’s work, or have to tell others what they’re suppose to do at work. Turns out, some of the best performing people are quite capable of leading others; they just don’t want to.

Certainly we all want a clear direction and agreements within trustworthy structures (like getting paid what was promised for doing a certain job with clear guidelines), but every adult has a will and mind of their own and that baseline of respect is at the heart of a coaching relationship. I might think I have the right answers for your situation, but you acting on your own behalf to find and test your own answers is far more generative. With time and experimentation, this discovery process will put you more fully in charge of your life. That’s what coaching can do!

When to use coaching? What are the 8 elements of skillful coaching?
In a nutshell, coaching is about establishing a productive, results-oriented context with clear goals and agreements, being present and “in service” to (focused on) these goals, and effective communication skills to address issues in ways that build trust, honest self-appraisal, safety to explore, learn and grow new self-awareness, confidence without arrogance, etc.

Coaching often involves devising support structures, brainstorming, and evaluating options. The “client” not only participates more fully in finding their own answers — providing techniques for resolving issues when coaching is not available — but also discovers their own strengths and areas for improvement, resulting in perhaps the most important reward of all: self-knowledge.

To assess your current level of mastery in the key coaching elements, click here

Note to managers, supervisors, and executives:

If you’ve ever wondered what makes people want to do a good job, it is because they choose to. The power to sustain your influence over time comes not from position but from voluntary agreement. You cannot require that people care — beyond the minimum of doing what’s required, they are ultimately their own moral compass about “how much is enough.”

The shift from positional to personal power is a matter of knowledge and skill. There is now a greater demand for managers, supervisors and executives to have ready the “people skills” of coaching to get results through collaboration, mutual accountability, and shared authority.

Dealing with someone who isn’t dealing well with others? Someone who has technical skills, and generally does good work, but seems to “put their foot in their mouth” interpersonally? Check out what we call “Maturity Coaching”.

Be sure to check out what recent clients have said about this work.