Facts About Coaching

Coaching is a fairly new industry as industries go…it began in 1989.  You are still getting in on the ground floor of a HUGE opportunity!

The Sydney Morning Herald a few years ago reported that personal coaching in the US was the second fastest growth industry, after IT. Apparently, there are 50,000 searches per month on Google alone from people looking for a coach. Further, one out of every five Fortune 500 companies is reported to now have a coach for each of their senior executives. While this field is at a nascent stage of evolution in Asia, it is already been embraced by a number of multinational and local organizations across the region.

The coaching industry today is clearly one of the fastest growing professions in the U.S. Coaching articles have appeared in nearly all major newspapers and magazines, including U.S. News & World Report, Time Magazine, Entepreneur Magazine, The Washington Post,The New York Times, and CNN.com.

There have been several surveys to measure the effectiveness of coaching. The easiest type of coaching to measure return on investment is obviously in the business industry, where one of the most popular surveys resulted in a 529% ROI.  A 2001 Manchester study of 100 executives from Fortune1000 companies found that the average ROI (return on investment) was 5.7 times the initial investment in a typical executive coaching assignment.

A Word about Coaching

Because life coaching and business coaching are relatively new professions, and many people haven’t had any direct experience working with a coach, the question of “how does coaching work?” is something we frequently hear.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that coaching is about giving advice.

Coaching – whether you work with a life coach or a business coach – asserts that all of the answers we seek are inside of ourselves. A good coach will not tell you what to do. The reason to work with a coach is to empower yourself to listen to your own inner voice, and to investigate the full spectrum of possible solutions to the barriers holding you or your business back. Seeking outside help can help you gain the clarity and focus necessary to succeed.

Life and business coaching are about permanent and fundamental shifts in your view of yourself and your business.  Coaching is about helping an individual or organization see a way to achieve a goal, remove a roadblock to achieving a goal, or a combination of the two.

According to Einstein, “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” A coach can help you shift your thinking into that new perspective.  A coach’s tools are great, probing, enlightening questions.  And a great coach has enough experience to ask the right, questions at the right time to help you make that shift quickly.

The International Coach Federation defines corporate or executive coaching as “a process for equipping individuals and teams with the tools, knowledge, and opportunities they need to be creatively productive and effective in their commitment to themselves, their organizations, and their work.” We proudly support this definition.

Life Coaching

A Success Coach guides and supports individuals in identifying the areas in their life that need changing and helps them overcome the obstacles that are holding them back from achieving a happy, successful, and balanced lifestyle.

Life coaching helps people close the gap between where they are currently and where they want to be, in both their personal and professional lives.

Life coaching helps people to:

• Set and achieve lifetime goals.
• Manage time and stress.
• Design smarter strategies and action plans for achieving their goals.
• Keep focus on the big picture.
• Improve personal effectiveness, communication, and productivity.
• Improve male and female relationships.
• Become a more effective parent.

Business Coaching

Business coaching is about helping business owners overcome the obstacles that are hold them and their business back.  These obstacles may be very obvious to them, but he/she doesn’t know how to overcome them or they’re too close to the situation to identify the obstacles.  Specifically identifying any obstacles and then working out a plan to overcome them is one of the first steps in the business coaching process.

Although they will be different for each business owner, their obstacles could range from:

• needing more knowledge or information feeling lost, no real sense of direction or vision working too hard in their business and not enough time spent on the development of the business not taking the actions that will drive results perhaps because of fear, lack of confidence or feeling uncertain needing to grow personally to handle whatever comes their way in their business.

According to an International Coach Federation survey, clients typically seek help with time management (81%); career guidance (74%) and business advice (74%). The benefits extend to self-awareness (68%); smarter goal setting (62%); a more balanced life (62%); reduced stress levels (57%); and more self-confidence (52%).

Executive Coaching

Companies often enlist the services of a Coach in order to:

• Assist newly appointed personnel in learning, progressing, and generating results more quickly.
• Assist existing top-level managers with leadership development, self-motivation, communication, and personal productivity.
• Assist existing top-level managers to further develop specific skills, become more effective time managers, and build fruitful relationships.
• Assist individuals and groups of employees to more effectively deal with increasing change.
• Assist key personnel with work/life balance and job satisfaction.
• Coach/train groups of team members to achieve maximum team synergy, customer satisfaction levels, productivity, and results.
• Produce more dynamic and better-performing teams so that companies may retain their employees longer, rather than lose them through disillusionment or from the effects of stress.
• MetrixGlobal, LLC a Fortune 500 telecommunications firm reported a ROI of 529% based on survey of 43 leadership development participants. They also found the financial benefits from increased retention raised the overall ROI to 788%.
• The Xerox Corporation showed that in the absence of follow-up coaching 87% of the skills change brought about by the training program was lost. However good skills’ training is in the classroom, most of its effectiveness is lost without follow-up coaching. For example: Most sales people try out the new skills for a few calls, find that they feel awkward and the new method isn’t bringing instant results, so they go back to their old ways.

“Coaching is the only cost-effective way to reinforce new behaviors and skills until a learner is through the dangerous results dip. Once through the dip, when the new skills bring results, they will become self-reinforcing.” — Training and Development Journal.