How Coaching Works
Coaching is a powerful tool that most anyone who is motivated can wield. There are several significant attributes of great coaching and it is the combination of them that is giving the newly founded Coaching Industry a reputation for being highly effective for a broad scope of applications. Expert coaching includes:
Creating a protected coaching space dedicated to your undivided focus on discovering and addressing your next area of growth or goal.
A highly trained listener and question architect that hears what you say and asks about what you have not said in order to take you to unexplored paradigms and possibilities.
An experienced coaching partner who believes you can succeed and knows how to help you do so.
Aside from your coach’s skills and encouragements, when you are committed to using the coaching process there is a natural sense of accountability that not only keeps you on track but instills in you a greater fervency for progress and follow through. In more ways than one, when you hire Craig Lomax as your coach, you are already part of the way to meeting your aspirations.
Who Benefits from Coaching?
Many of the world’s most productive, innovative and respected people turn to coaching as a tool to help them realize and efficiently reach internal and external goals. It’s not weakness that needs a coach; it’s strength that can use coaching as a powerful tool. If you want to be more productive, have more influence as a team leader, have a better work-life balance, or simply be more present with your family... your coach believes you know, deep inside, the reasons you are currently not being the person who produces what you want, and that you can figure out a plan for change and have the gumption to bring it to fruition. While this ability lies within most people, there remain areas of every life that are not moving forward as well as they could, and often, important areas that are not moving at all. Coaching isn't about helping people because they are incapable, it's about partnering with people because they are capable; capable of more amazing things than they can efficiently reach by themselves.
The Coaching Space
Your relationship with your coach provides you with opportunities that no other relationship in your life can. If you have never experienced great coaching, this may sound difficult to believe. Your coach’s job is not that of a therapist, consultant, mentor, or trainer, where input and direction is a significant part of the process. Nor is a coach connected to you the way a business partner, supervisor, friend, spouse, parent, or family member is. Therefore, you and your coach can create an unbiased, uniquely protected space that is all about you, but not critical of you. It is a confidential and sheltered place where the unfiltered thoughts and feelings you share are not judged and will stay private. All of this adds up to a surprisingly freeing environment for you to explore yourself, to clarify your thoughts, emotions, and vision, to strategize for impactful change, and to muster the confident resolve that makes it happen.
The Power of Coaching Questions
Answers don’t reveal themselves until we ask them to.
You are the foremost authority on who you are, what you think, how you behave, what you believe, and what you truly want. You are able to take a good question and use it to tap into this sometimes unrecognized expertise so it can be applied to the way you work and live.
As a client, you own the truth you discover in a more powerful way than when you are told about those same truths. When asked a good question, you can reach down into the dark for answers and pull them up into the light by newly discovered handles; those are the answers you “own”.
Coaching questions come from the coach’s curiosity and therefore a different perspective than that of the client. Even the simplest of questions can be profoundly effective when they are ones not yet considered.
When questions are inspired by active listening — by what the client says — it puts two heads together, working in cooperation, and two heads are better than one.
Coaching questions are genuine, objective, nonjudgmental and not intended to give direction or correction. Therefore, even the most sensitive topic can be wisely asked about without causing defensiveness: giving the client unguarded access to the truth within. This is one of the facets of a trusting coach-client relationship that makes it like no other professional or personal one, and uniquely effective.
Does Craig’s Experience Make a Difference?
Although expert listening and asking skills are the most powerful tools of good coaches, there is more to a coaching relationship with Craig. He has over 30 years invested in the development of people and programs. Productively caring about dozens of individuals, their growth and outcomes, over a long period of time has deepened his understanding of the principles foundational to many aspects of leadership, business, family, and transformative growth. He draws from this bank of insights when designing powerful questions, offering input that might affirm a client’s discovery or challenge one’s line of thinking.
In addition, it is often helpful for coaches to offer models and assessments for the client to leverage. Craig has several of these he has either collected or engineered himself. They address topics such as leadership, management, relationships, goal setting, joy, emotion management, performance, and time management. Some can be quickly implemented within a session, while others require a separate appointment.
To take the next step or for more details about how a coaching relationship with Craig Lomax works, check out: