A Personal Development Coach:
What kind of support do you need?

Do you know how to ensure there's a good fit between the personal development coach you choose, their approach to coaching, their experience and qualifications ... and your needs as a client? Here are some important ideas to bear in mind when you're looking for a personal development coach.

They are designed to help you decide who you'd like to work with. It takes a coaching approach: asking you to consider various issues and questions and apply them to your own needs. It's the first of a two-part article.

The second part – called 'a life coach for personal development' – looks at how we work with people here at Deeper Coaching. It sets out a range of options for you, and tells you about our  particular strengths, experience and interests in life coaching and personal development.

First, let's define life coaching

Life coaching has gradually emerged from sports coaching and workplace mentoring / advising of junior staff. So, when I first Googled 'What is life coaching?' I came up with this:

“Coaching is a method of directing, instructing and training a person or group of people, with the aim to achieve some goal or develop specific skills and abilities.”

I also found a very different definition of life coaching:

“Life coaching is a future-focused practice with the aim of helping clients determine and achieve personal goals. Life coaches use multiple methods that will help clients with the process of setting and reaching goals. Coaching is not targeted at psychological illness and coaches are neither therapists nor consultants.”

The emphasis of these two definitions of life coaching are very different. You need to be clear about that difference.

Are you looking for a mentor? That is an advisor, instructor or a trainer with specific skills you want them to pass on to you? This is a teacher-student, senior-junior or doctor-patient approach. That is, an 'expert' has skills or knowledge that you want to learn or that they use on your behalf. Typically the expert has significant power in the process.

I use the term 'mentor' to mean someone who draws on their own knowledge, skill and experience to guide another person towards a particular course of action.

Mentors tend to lend you their map

Personal development coaches teach you map-making

Are you looking for someone who will act as a sounding board, who will help you explore your own life story to help you identify your own aspirations, dreams, goals ... and then to achieve them?

For me, as a personal development coach, I stop short of advising. You are always the expert in your own life.

If you are looking for feedback; for possibilities to consider; to get to 'Ah-ha!' moments of insight – then you need to be sure that you retain power in the relationship. You need to work with a coach who will facilitate your learning without telling you what that learning ought to be.

As a personal development coach, I reckon I'm here to teach you map-making. My map isn't likely to be relevant to your needs, but knowing how I made my map could be very helpful to you.

Do you see the difference between the two kinds of help? The first group is more specific, the focus is mainly outside you, on the context, on processes and procedures.

The second, 'personal development coach' list is more focused on you as a person –  who you are ... and what you bring to the situation that impacts on your experiences.

Too much advice at the wrong time and place – particularly about personal development issues – can create dependence on the coach. If that happens it will undermine your ability to take charge of your own life.

You need to feel reasonably empowered yourself to benefit from advice without giving up some of your autonomy, your ability to direct your own choices.

Questions for you to focus on with your personal development coach:

• What are you hoping to achieve?
• Does it seem within your grasp?
• Are you reasonably confident that you can make the changes you need to?
• Have you tried, and failed to make these changes before?
• Will you achieve what you want by learning new skills or knowledge?
• Are you aware of blocking or subverting your self in some way?
• Do you need to make changes to how you think and feel to realise your ambitions?

Questions for your prospective coach:

• What is your coaching style?
• What kinds of clients do you have most success with?
• What is the place of goal-setting in the way you work?
• What personal life experiences inform the way you work?
• What professional background, experience and qualifications do you have?
  
  

Definition of personal development

Here at Deeper Coaching we define personal development as a process of consciously learning to re-connect with our full human potential. That is, the potential to:

• live a life we choose
• be happy
• be creative
• feel fulfilled
  
  

Why, “consciously”?

Because we've already done a lot of unconscious personal development.

We've grown from children into adults, passed through transitional stages like gaining a brother or sister, going to school, passing through adolescence, developing romantic attachments, starting work, becoming parents, weathering illness or trauma. All this made us what we are today through its impact on our personal development.

Who we are as people – the development of our personality and character – is shaped by the lessons we learn from this process. Some of us grow strong, gain in confidence, become more capable, happy and fulfilled. We experience a virtuous cycle, where one positive experience leads to another.

Some of us experience a vicious cycle where we feel undermined by a negative experience ... and that just seems to prepare the way for more negative experiences.

We unconsciously learn to expect the worst ... and life seems to confirm the expectations – the lessons – that the School of Hard Knocks taught us.

Either way, we learned these lessons unconsciously – we weren't aware of what we were learning as it happened. These experiences shape what we believe about ourselves, other people and the world around us. But they're not locked-in, or hard-wired.

Just briefly for now: we're responsible for maintaining those beliefs. If we remain unaware of them, they go on influencing us unconsciously. If we learn to focus our awareness on them, get them out into the cold light of day, they often disappear.

As a personal development coach, one of my key roles is to help you see these mistaken beliefs stand out for what they are: leeches that drain your vitality, creativity, freedom and happiness. I don't want to minimise the effort involved – but I don't want to make this process seem too daunting.

We are the story we tell about ourselves

We continuously define who we are by repeating thoughts, images, ideas, stories and sub-plots about who we are. Once we become aware that this is a story we're telling ourselves – we can re-write it. Second time round, we can choose how we write that story.

'Author' and 'authentic' come from the same root. We're on the hunt for the authentic you, the real you.

Many people have made journeys to discover the nooks and crannies in their 'inner landscape' where these old beliefs lie hidden, creating their mischief.

How I define personal development coaching

I define personal development coaching as a learning partnership in which the coach helps their client:

• become aware of the hidden barriers to a happy and successful life
• identify those barriers and devise strategies to break them down
• replace negative beliefs with positive beliefs
• devise activities that reinforce those positive beliefs
• maintain those new, positive activities until they become second-nature
• become the artist creating their masterpiece ... an authentic, purposeful life

As a personal development coach, what do I do?

• keep a space that feels safe and friendly, but is a place for real work
• put the wits I've developed over years of listening to stories at your disposal
• listen to your story with openness, curiosity and sincerity
• prompt you to tell it beyond your usual limits
• watch for the way you react as you tell it
• become very curious about what makes you tick
• get even more curious if you tock when you should be tickin'!
• listen for clues about the hidden beliefs that restrict you
• say: “You rushed that ... it's probably important ... can we go back there?” quite a bit
• watch for patterns of repeated unwanted behaviours
• provide feedback to you about what I'm noticing
• negotiate with you the re-telling of your personal story

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Where to next?

On this site:

There's more about the range of activities used in the Deeper Coaching process; different starting-points for life coaching in the article a life coach for personal development.

Off this site:

Paul Appleyard runs an online service for people who are at a crossroads in their life, or whose main concern is shyness. Online coaching may be a reassuring place to start to recover, or discover, your self confidence. He is "your pathfinder coach".

Ask questions, subscribe to my personal development coaching newsletter, get free downloads on the contact deeper coaching page.

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