Professional Life Coach
David B. Bohl
Answers Frequently Asked Questions
Q. What is coaching and what is its purpose?
A. Coaching:
- Is a thought provoking, creative partnership.
- Inspires personal and professional potential.
- Produces fulfilling results in a person's personal and professional life.
- Improves performance and enhances the quality of a person's life.
It's a process of:
- Critical reflection.
- Investigation of possible courses of action.
- Goal setting and achievement.
Q. How does coaching differ from therapy?
A. Professional coaches are private guides who work to help people define and develop personal strengths; create a plan for living that answers to a person's unique wants and needs; and motivate him or her to perform better in identified areas of life.
Coaches:
- Are trained to listen, observe, and customize an approach to a person's needs.
- Seeks to elicit strategies and solutions from a client.
- Enhances existing client skills, resources and creativity.
Therapists, on the other hand, use a variety of communication methods to help improve relationships or make a positive impact on an individual's mental health. Note that coaches are NOT mental health professionals. They do not diagnose, treat, or 'fix' people. Coaches are living tools and collaborative partners for motivation, personal growth and accountability.
Q. How does coaching differ from consulting?
A. Professional coaches are personal pathfinders who help people find their way.
Coaches Are:
- Trained to guide clients to their own solutions, not to hand fixed solutions to them.
- Focused on people, not the bottom line.
- Engaged to assist clients in achieving certain outcomes, not to create a predetermined outcome.
Consultants, on the other hand, give expert or professional advice in specific disciplines. Their clients seek facts and opinions. Consultants direct clients to administer the consultant's solutions and achieve predetermined results.
Q. How does coaching differ from mediation?
A. Professional coaches work with individuals and groups in ways that are mindful of the conscious and unconscious dynamics at work between them and their peers, as well as their professional affiliations. Coaches focus on each individual's situations, wants, and needs, not of any particular relationship between individuals.
Coaches:
- May focus on disagreements and conflicting vested interests of each person.
- Focused on individuals, not teams or organizations.
- Engaged to assist clients as individuals, not relationships between two or more people and/or groups.
Mediators, in contrast, generally focus on workplace situations and dispute resolution between two or more people. When a difficult relationship is disrupting an organization or partnership, whether it is professional or personal, mediators may offer to resolve these disputes.
Q. What's the difference between a coach and a really good friend or close relative?
A. The relationship of trust a person builds and grows with a coach is rare for many reasons. For instance, clients will receive these three benefits from work with David Bohl:
- An Outside Perspective: Someone who can point out blind spots in a safe environment.
- An Accountability Partner: Someone who supports a client's goals and dreams and reminds them at the "right time."
- The Truth: Most professionals have a vested interest in keeping customers happy, sometimes at the expense of honesty. Bohl tells the truth 100% of the time.
It's often difficult for a client to be completely honest about himself in regard to friends and relatives. Bohl will be more honest with a client and on the subject of her than anyone else.
Coaching is liberating, refreshing, energizing, enlivening, and it is empowering to be heard and understood as well as be granted the time and space to say what you think.
Q. What do coaches do during a typical session?
A. Coaching sessions...
- Give you the freedom to choose the direction of the conversation.
- Focus on goals and objectives.
- Are robust with questions, concepts, and action-sparking principles.
- Provide clarity.
- Accelerate progress with more possibilities.
- Concentrate on where a client is and where her or she wants to be.
Q. What are the benefits of personal coaching?
A. Coaching offers the following advantages:
- Fresh perspectives on opportunities and challenges.
- Enhanced thinking and decision-making skills.
- Improved interpersonal effectiveness.
- Increased confidence in carrying out a client's chosen work and life roles.
- Increased productivity.
- Increased personal satisfaction with life and work.
- Achievement of personally relevant goals.
Q. Why hire Bohl as a personal coach?
A. Because he may help a client address the following situations in his/her life:
- Challenges, goals or opportunities
- Gaps in skills, knowledge, resources, or confidence
- The client's want or need to step up results
- A setback or lack of clarity
- Imminent success in a professional life that's becoming hard to handle
- Work and life that are out of balance
- The need to identify and maximize strengths
- Desire for a simpler, less complicated life
- Wish to be more organized and self-disciplined
Q. What life issues have clients brought to Bohl?
A. The relationships Bohl has with his clients are strictly confidential. Here are some issues, however, that his clients have faced:
- They're successful but not fulfilled, and they need and deserve to find out why.
- They are successful but stressed out and/or burnt out.
- They feel like they are stumbling, vacillating, and/or at a dead end in their career.
- They have difficulty with work-life balance.
- They want to be more professionally successful.
- They feel stuck and stagnant - creatively, personally or professionally.
- They sense that they're not making the most of their lives, and they want more.
- They desire to raise the bar on life - professionally and personally.
- They desire happiness, fulfillment, peace of mind, and the feeling of being safe and secure.
Contact:
David B. Bohl
Reflections Coaching LLC
Slow Down FAST
N77 W28559 Appaloosa Lane
Hartland, Wisconsin 53029
Email: david@slowdownfast.com
Web: http://www.SlowDownFAST.com
