At its most basic, coaching is a powerful collaborative process between coach and client that aims to improve the client’s life. Yet within the overall broad umbrella term of ‘coaching’, there are many different coaching styles, each focused on specific audiences or areas of growth.
Whilst there are too many to name and describe in detail here, in this article we explore three of the most common and popular coaching styles that exist in the coaching world, as well as sharing our very own style of coaching: Transformational Coaching.
Executive/Leadership Coaching
Sometimes also called corporate coaching, this coaching style is delivered in the workplace by an internal staff coach or by an outside coach who is hired to work with the organisation. As the name suggests, executive or leadership coaching focuses on helping senior leaders improve their leadership skills and outcomes. Other topics clients might explore could include finding greater work/life balance, managing organisational change, increasing emotional intelligence, and becoming a more proficient manager.
Where we see our coaches using it
Various Animas-trained coaches incorporate executive and corporate coaching into their coaching practice. Some have designed their own workshops and training programmes that are delivered within various organisations, while others have worked as one-to-one executive coaches within organisations, delivering regular coaching sessions to improve all manner of things from productivity and management skills to maintaining a happy team and improving communication. There is a lot of scope for working as an executive coach, particularly if you have experience in the corporate sector. How and where exactly you work all depends on what you are looking for from a corporate coaching role.
Life Coaching
Also known as personal coaching (in that it works with individuals outside of the workplace setting), life coaching helps clients create a more fulfilled life by envisioning and achieving their personal and professional goals. While life coaching operates on the premise that clients are whole, complete and already have the answers within themselves, through working together with a coach, an individual is able to better decipher their own thoughts and reflections, ultimately finding their own answers or goals, and in turn, overcoming difficult challenges and emotional blockages. Life coaches may focus on specific topics such as confidence, health, parenting, or dating, also known as ‘niching’, or may work broadly across many subject areas, depending upon both the needs of the client and the skills of the coach.
Where we see our coaches using it
This is one of the more common paths that we see our qualified coaches follow, a great number of whom set up life coaching practices that focus on a one-to-one dynamic. From relationships to creativity, family dynamics to self-confidence, there are Animas coaches occupying all manner of specialist areas of life coaching, and plenty more whose coaching businesses are more broad. It is worth noting that while some coaches know their ‘calling’ or ‘niche’ from the outset, a great many more fall into their specialist area as they coach more and become aware of what they enjoy the most. The point is that if you don’t know who you want to work with when training as a life coach, don’t panic. You will find your niche as you move forward on your coaching journey.
This article around finding your niche using the INSPIRED model might be useful to check out if you’d like to explore what your coaching niche might be.
Performance Coaching
This style of coaching is designed to sharpen and increase levels of performance by the most effective and efficient means possible. Formerly, this coaching discipline was synonymous with elite athletes, focusing on performance at key events and using both psychological and physiological elements. Today, performance coaching has broadened and is routinely used across all industries, including creative, financial, and business, to realise staff potential and achieve gains at all levels. It is also often used to address areas of stress, burnout, and absenteeism.
Transformational Coaching – The Animas Approach
This powerful style, which is at the heart of the our training programmes, has much in common with life coaching, in that it helps clients improve their lives by bringing about important and necessary changes. However, rather than simply focusing on shifting actions, transformational coaching aims to go deeper, changing the way clients view themselves, other people, and the world around them.
With transformational coaching, the coach helps the client to explore the underlying assumptions, beliefs, values, expectations, and attitudes that shape their experience of themselves, their world and other people. This exploration begins, as with other styles of coaching, with the client bringing specific challenges, issues or aspirations to the table. But rather than focusing purely on resolving or achieving those, transformational coaching seeks to also explore what is at the heart of them. It is multi-disciplinary, having roots in traditional coaching techniques, but also using learnings and techniques drawn from neuroscience, psychotherapy, philosophy and psychology, to enable and sustain transformation.
Are you interested in finding out more about transformational coaching, what it is, and how you might work as a transformational coach?
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