Dr.Phil's Approach

1. What is coaching? What is Life Coaching? Business Coaching? Career Coaching?
2. Who is a coach?
3. How is coaching different from Therapy?Consulting?Sports coaching? A best friend?
4. What is the basic philosophy of coaching?
5. Who hires a coach and why?
6. How do I go about finding a terrific coach who is just right for me?
7. What happens when I hire you as my coach? What can I expect?
8. Does the coach work on personal goals or business/professional goals?
9. Where does the coach focus with an average client?
10. What issues might I bring to a coaching relationship?
11. How can coaching help my business?
12. Why does coaching work?
13. Why is coaching becoming so popular?
14. Can you give me some context about coaching?
15. What is the media saying about coaching?
16. What about people who are already doing really well in their lives? Why would they need a coach?
17. Can a dependency be created between coach and client?
18. Can I hire a coach just for a short-term, special project?
19. How long must I commit if I start working with a coach?
20. What does it cost to hire a coach?
21. Am I ready for coaching?
22. Are you the right coach for me?
23. What free extra value can I expect?
24. What unique services does Designing Your Success provide?
    

1- What is coaching? What is Life Coaching? Business Coaching? Career Coaching?

Coaching has emerged in the last ten year as a revolutionary powerful approach in an on-going supportive relationship that will assist you in taking proactive steps toward creating the life you want. It is a confidential partnership tailored to your needs allowing you to take advantage of the opportunities in your life, discover your unique potential, accomplish your most valued goals, create and design a life that is balanced, satisfying and fulfilling. Your coach is a personal trainer for your life. A highly trained coach provides the tools and guidance to promote self-expression that stimulates effective and sustainable growth.

• Coaching is a creative way to respond to today's incredible opportunities, diverse personal and professional challenges, fierce competition, and new advanced standards for wellness and self-care.
  
• Coaching is collaborative, with a foundation of trust, honesty, respect, and openness.
  
• Coaching is effective, focused, and tailored to your specific needs.
  
• Coaching has a positive, healthy orientation.
  
• Coaching is not psychotherapy. Coaching is particularly for those who are willing to take a healthier and deeper level of responsibility for their lives.
  
• Coaching is a safe place to explore new possibilities, to move beyond self-imposed limits.
  
• Coaching is mostly conducted on the telephone.
  
• Coaching is confidential within the limits of the law.

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2- Who is a coach?

A coach is (and I am):

• your partner in achieving your personal goals,
• your champion during a turnaround,
• your trainer in communication and life skills,
• your sounding board when making choices,
• your motivator when strong actions are called for,
• your unconditional support when you take a hit,
• your mentor in personal development,
• your co-designer when developing an extraordinary project,
• your beacon during stormy times,
• your wake-up call if you don't hear your own,
• your partner in living the life you know you're ready for, personally and professionally.

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3- How is coaching different from therapy? Consulting? Sports coaching? A best friend?

Therapy

• Coaching is not therapy. Coaching concentrates primarily on the present and future. Therapy focuses more on the past or on the past's impact on the present. Coaching uses information from the client's past to clarify where the client is today. It does not depend on resolution of the past to move the client forward, creating the action needed to reach the client's desired outcomes.
• Coaching assumes the presence of emotional reactions to life events and that clients are capable of expressing and handling their emotions, with the support of a coach, if needed. Psychotherapy deals with emotional healing and relief from psychological pain.
• Coaching is often used concurrently with psychotherapeutic work. It is not used as a substitute for therapy.

For more on How Coaching Differs From Therapy, please click here.

Consulting

Coaching has some similarities with consulting. However, the coach stays with the client to help implement the new skills, changes and goals, to make sure that they really happen. Advice, opinions, or suggestions are occasionally offered in coaching. Both the client and the coach understand that the client is free to accept or decline what is offered and takes the ultimate responsibility for action.

Sports coaching

Coaching includes several principles from sports coaching, like teamwork, going for the goal, being your best. Unlike sports coaching, most professional coaching is not competition or win/lose based. Coaches focus on strengthening their clients' skills, not on helping them beat the other team. Coaches look for win/win solutions.

Best friend

A best friend is wonderful to have. But is your best friend a professional who you will trust to work with you on the most important aspects of your life and/or business? Have both - a best friend and a coach.

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4- What is the basic philosophy of coaching?

Simply put, it is that we humans are great, that we're all discovering what we really want, and that we can get what we want faster and more easily by having a coach who's been there and who can help us.

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5- Who hires a coach and why?

People from all walks of life and backgrounds hire coaches. In my coaching practice I have helped parents, homemakers, college students, professionals, employees, entrepreneurs, business owners, executives, physically challenged, chronic diseased, just to name a few.

People hire a coach because:

• They want more.
• They want to grow.
• They want to do things more easily.

It's as simple as that. Coaches help a client get all three, quickly.
A few examples:

• You want to be more consistently successful at having what you want in life.
• You want to clarify your life direction.
• You would like more joy, fulfillment, inner peace, or balance in your life.
• You want to be more successful with less effort.
• You want a cleaner alignment between how you live your life and what you most value.
• You want more health and to take better care of yourself.

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6- How do I go about finding a terrific coach who is just right for me?

When shopping for a coach, there are two very important things to look for:

• Certification: Not all people who call themselves a coach are certified by an accredited professional school, nor are they even true coaches for that matter. In fact, most self-proclaimed life and business coaches are neither. Certification is very important, because life coaching is a profession that requires very specific skills, conduct standards, and a foundation of training which is only taught in qualified schools. Regardless of what some may try to tell you, life experience and other types of experience or training are simply not enough. Would you hire a psychologist who didn't have formal training?
  Denise Braunstein graduated by one of the most highly acclaimed coach training institutions in the world – Coach U, accredited by ICF. Then, she proceeded to receive her PCC coaching certification from ICF (International Coach Federation), which is the umbrella organization that sets and monitors the international standards for professional coaching ethics, training and practices.
  Denise’s PCC certification requirements from ICF included over 300 hours of rigorous training, written and oral exams, live and recorded coaching sessions, all of which are essential to truly grasp and practice the fundamentals of in-depth, breakthrough coaching. On top of that, she has 10 years of coaching clients full time, and other 15 years working in clinical practice and organizations as therapist, career counselor, educator, coach, and organizational psychologist.
  
  
• A Good Match:   An effective coach for one person may not be a good match for another. Personal chemistry is important. To find a good match, it's best to speak directly with your potential coach and ask for a sample session. You'll want to be sure you feel comfortable enough with your coach to develop the deep trust so necessary for breakthrough coaching.

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7- What happens when I hire you as my coach? What can I expect?

Many things, but the most important are that you:

• Take yourself more seriously.
• Take more effective and focused actions immediately.
• Stop putting up with what is dragging you down.
• Create momentum so that it's easier to get results.
• Set better goals that are more exactly what YOU want.
• Clarify your values and direction. (Direction is a vector determined by where you are now and where you want to go.)
• Decrease your stress.
• Boost your self-esteem.
• Expand fully your self-expression.
• Enhance and acquire new skills.

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8- Do you, as the coach, work on personal goals or business/professional goals?

Both, actually. With the line between personal and business life blurring, I'm professionally trained to work with all aspects of you: life (relationships, health and wellbeing, spirituality, etc), career/profession, business.

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9- Where do you focus with an average client?

I focus where clients need the most.

Part of our discussions often include:

• Getting the client's personal foundation strengthened.
• Helping clients beef up their reserve.
• Helping the client set goals based on individual personal values.

By including these with what each client wants, I help clients have fewer problems and focus on what will make them the most successful, happy and fulfilled. Clients really enjoy this approach!

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10- What issues might I bring to our coaching relationship?

Just to name a few ...
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• Career change
• Transitions -life, professional, business
• Clarification of values
• Financial problems
• Focus
• Goal setting - management
• Leadership/vision
• Lifestyle design
• Management skills
• Marketing
• Motivation

• People skills
• Personal development
• Productivity/effectiveness
• Relationships
• Self-confidence
• Selling skills
• Business start-up
• Team building
• Health care and management
• Parenting
• Spirituality

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11- How can DYS Coaching help my business?

• An unbiased person to help sort through issues.
• Attract clients and new business.
• Create balance and increase profits: make more money in less time.
• Design your business to work for you (so you run it and it doesn't run you).
• Identify potential obstacles to your success and take action to overcome them.
• Improve communication at all levels - staff and client or customer.
• Learn to have a great life outside of your business.

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12- Why does DYS Coaching work?

Some of the reasons are:

• Synergy between the coach and client creates momentum.
• Better goals are set -- ones that naturally pull the client toward the goal rather than goals that require the client to push themselves to the goal.
• The client develops new skills, and these skills translate into more success.

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13- Why is coaching becoming so popular?

Coaching is becoming popular for several reasons:

• Many people are tired of doing what they think they "should" do and are ready to do something special and meaningful for the rest of their lives. One problem is that many can't see what this is or, if they can, they can't find a way to reorient their life around it. A coach can help them do both.
• People are realizing how simple it can be to accomplish something that several years ago might have felt out of reach or like a pipedream. A coach is not a miracle worker (well, sometimes they are), but a coach does have a large tool kit to help the Big Idea become a Reality. Fortunately, people now have time and resources to invest in themselves in this kind of growth.
• Spirituality. America is growing more spiritual very quickly. (My working definition of spirituality? "How connected you are with yourself and others.") The coach helps the clients to tune in better to themselves and to others.

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14- Can you give me some context about coaching?

A life coach does just what an athletic coach, a personal trainer, or music teacher does, only in a fuller and bigger way. A coach challenges you and takes the time to find out what winning in life means to you. A coach is your partner in living the life you know you can accomplish, personally and professionally. A coach is someone to hold you accountable for your life, to make sure you really do live up to your potential.

No matter where you are in life, there is always a desire for more. More success, more money, closer relationships, a deeper feeling of meaning in life, etc. It is the nature of people to want to attain more, become more, be more, and we all struggle with how to get what we're looking for.

Most people believe that "hard work and doing it on your own" are the keys to finding the life, success, money, or happiness that they seek. They believe that a price must be paid to attain what they want, and often that price is poor health, not having enough time to enjoy life, strained family relationships or lessened productivity. The saddest part is that, even though this effort may result in more of something, it is often not the something you had in mind, and you end up back where you started, or worse, further from your real intentions.

Athletes, politicians, executives, and performers know about this trap. They know they need someone else, a trained someone else to help them set goals, discover real needs, and work effectively toward ultimate goals of excellence. So, they are willing to hire a coach. None of those people would expect to progress very far without one.

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15- What is the media saying about coaching?

"Many who want a winning record in the game of life are skipping the shrink and hiring a life coach instead. … Once reserved for executives facing tough decisions in elite corners of corporate America, coaching is trickling down to the masses. Think of coaching as having your own Dr. Phil on call -- someone there not to diagnose emotional problems or feel your pain, but to tell you to buckle up and help you make a plan. … The coaching relationship functions as a collaborative business arrangement. Coaching is two persons coming together to co-create. One has expertise in change; the other has expertise in their life."
The Washington Post, June 2003

..."Now, in midlife, as those pesky identity-crisis bells ring even louder, boomers are turning in droves to a new kind of self-help professional: the life coach..."
MORE Magazine , July 2003

"Your success as an executive depends on how effectively you function in several domains: cognitive (Do you know your stuff?), physical (Do you deliver it well?) and emotional (Do you care? Do you convey it? Do you handle yourself and others effectively?).
Contrast this with the consultants' domains -- structural, strategic or operational issues -- and you'll quickly see that coaches work in a different arena. Theirs is the intangible but powerful world of human dynamics, where the focus is on things like your credibility, interpersonal skill and ability to self-manage and adapt quickly in tough new situations.
A coach's key tools are observation, feedback, and questions designed to expand your awareness of the personal habits and qualities that affect your success. A good coach can move through an organization and get confidential information about how others view you and your work that never surfaces in performance reviews."
Cincinnati Business Courier , June 2003

To read more about what the media is saying about coaching please CLICK HERE.

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16- What about people who are already doing really well in their lives? Why would they need a coach?

They might not need a coach. But it is helpful to find out: are they doing what they most enjoy? Are they tolerating anything? Is life easy? Are they going to be financially independent within the next 15 years? Do they have what they most want? I've discovered that, often, people need to expect more out of their lives. I can help in this process.

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17- Can a dependency be created between you and the client?

Not really. The client may "need" the coach in order to maximize an opportunity or accelerate their growth, yet not be "dependent" on the coach. Anyone who's working on major changes "needs" structure, advice, support and a place to brag, so, in that sense, I'm definitely helpful, but an emotional, psychological dependency is not created. My commitment as your coach is to help you create a better present and future: more success, more money, more joy and happiness, with a higher quality of life.

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18- Can I hire you just for a short-term, special project?

Yes. Some clients hire me to help them accomplish specific goals or projects. Usually, however, clients keep working with me after that because there are even more exciting things to accomplish.

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19- How long must I commit if I start working with you?

Most coaches ask for a three to six month commitment (like me), but I usually let you stop immediately if coaching is not working for you right now. While some clients stay a few months, others prefer to devote more time to being coached, or retain me as their coach for a continual part of their winning strategy.

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20- What does it cost to hire a coach?

Most coaches working with individuals charge about $250 to $800 per month for one 30-50 minutes call per week, depending on their experience and credentials. It all works to about $100 to $150 per hour. All coaching fees depend on the specific coaching requirements of each client. I also provide to my clients, free of charge, email coaching feedback, emergency mini-sessions, coaching programs and assessments. Please, don't hesitate to contact me for information about your own coaching investment.

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21- Am I ready for coaching?

If you have read this far, it would be fair to say that you are looking for something. We all are, that's what makes us human. Unfortunately, what we want or need to live a more meaningful life was usually not taught at school or home. So if you're ready to live the life you've dreamed, create the business you've envisioned, then you're ready for coaching.
Take the Readiness For Coaching Test NOW. See for yourself if coaching is for you and if it's the right time to engage in this new journey of your life.

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22-Are you the right coach for me?

Possibly, and are you the right client for me? The only way to find out is for us to interview each other. Contact me to set a free consultation. What one thing would make a difference in your life if it happened right now? Bring that answer and three more questions or problems to the complimentary consultation. I would love to help!

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23-What free extra value can I expect?

Sometimes you just cannot wait until your next session. You may have a short question or request for feedback. You may need a confidential response to some situation that you can trust. As a value added, I offer my regular clients free telephone and e-mail consultations of under ten minutes between sessions, within reason.

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24-What unique services does Designing Your Success provide?

• I will assist you in identifying the gap between where you are and where you would like to be, and then "coach across" that gap (so that your current reality is more and more like your stated goals). I will often actively challenge both your definition of current reality and the relevance of your stated goals, to maximize the possibility that your goals are truly congruent with who you are and who you want to be at the deepest levels. Have you ever set a goal, reached it, and then found that it was not nearly as satisfying or fulfilling as you expected? Or that it led the rest of your life to be out of balance? Many coaches do not invite this kind of investigation, yet it is the crucial foundation for all subsequent work.
• Once you have identified your current reality and goals, most coaches are able to help you identify logical next steps and action plans for reaching those goals. Most of us regularly identify logical and obvious next steps, yet fail to follow through on those actions. I have found that the real art and skill of coaching is in helping you to understand what gets in your way during these times, and then effectively dissolving those obstacles.
• My focus is on effortlessness - how to be more successful with less effort, with less expenditure of internal and external resources, how to be successful without agitation. Solutions that depend on force of will are inherently limited - we cannot consistently maintain that sort of effort. That is why people who listen to motivational speakers usually find that they have increased momentum for some short period of time, and then things essentially return to normal. I can help you identify alternative solutions that do not depend on force of will, and are more effective and long lasting.

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Email:Denise@designingyoursuccess.com