LIFE COACHING AND CAREER MENTORING
Life Coaching
Using a life-skills coaching approach, Linda teaches powerful and effective self-help techniques for reaching your full potential. She has considerable experience in helping people to: gain clarity about career direction; achieve career goals; build confidence, creativity and better business relationships; and banish anxiety, conflict, indecision and feelings of inadequacy. Her mentoring approach is also the basis of her emotional intelligence training.
What is Life Coaching?
Life coaching is sometimes called personal coaching, business coaching, corporate coaching or executive coaching. It is a new professional service that has been available in Australia for over five years and in the United States for more than ten. This kind of mentoring has probably existed in one form or another for hundreds if not thousands of years. However, in its current relatively structured form, it is proving to be a fast growing and popular part of the $100 billion per year global personal development and training industry and is attracting considerable media attention.
The bottom line is that great results are being achieved and it actually works!
It is a mentoring process in which a person who has achieved their own life goals and believes in you:
- helps you to gain the clarity you need to discover what is rewarding, fulfilling and satisfying so you can set goals that reflect your interests, skills, strengths, personal values and temperament (rather than whims, instant gratification or social/marketing pressures) and thereby joyfully commit to doing things you care passionately about
- gives you 100% support and guidance in the use of empowering tools which enable you to take steps (such as gaining confidence and insight, finding direction, developing action plans, making significant changes and improving relationships) which unleash your unrealised potential so you can move forward to live the life you really want to live.
- Assists you to reach your chosen goals more quickly and with less stress by reducing learning curves, creating better solutions and avoiding expensive mistakes.
Benefits
Coaching can be applied to every area of your life - personal and professional. Linda has worked with hundreds of clients over the last five years. The following is a list of the kinds of benefits she has seen people receive as a result of the coaching process.
- enhanced career performance
- more free time, more fun and more money
- more effective communication
- personal empowerment
- increased emotional intelligence and self-awareness
- increased calmness, peace, happiness, creativity, energy, health, fitness, and vitality
- better concentration and mental function
- enhanced ability to identify stress factors and eliminate the stress they cause
- clarity about what one is passionate about
- identification of opportunities for success which are aligned with one's true nature
- successful career transition
- love of one's life as it is
- decision-making in alignment with one's skills, strengths and personal values
- increased ability to build productive relationships (both personal and professional)
- mproved self-confidence, clarity, focus and balance
- more effective implementation of change in one's business or personal life
- improved ability to organize, set boundaries and eliminate clutter
Why Life Coaching Works
Coaching motivates you to spend time focused on and working toward your goals so you actually achieve them. It does this by making sure you've chosen the most rewarding goals for you. It also makes you accountable to someone else. This accountability dramatically increases your perseverance and perseverance usually pays off.
Through wise guidance from someone who has undergone thousands of hours of personal development work and succeeded in achieving their own goals, coaching can save you much time, money and frustration. It is easy to waste a lot of energy going off on a tangent, taking on too much too soon or criticizing ourselves. Honest and open feedback can help us to see blind-spots that it might take weeks, months or years to discover on our own. Encouragement, support, validation, inspiration and practical action-oriented guidance can stretch us to see beyond our limited view of ourselves to what is possible so that we not only achieve our goals more quickly but also reap benefits well beyond our expectations.
Would You Benefit From Life Coaching?
If there is any area of your personal or professional life in which you have been unable to achieve a high degree of satisfaction
AND
You are ready to make changes
AND
You are willing to step beyond your comfort zone
THEN
It is highly likely that you can benefit from life coaching.
Do I Need a Life Coach or a Counsellor?
It is often said that life coaching is for people who are basically satisfied with their lives and that others should seek counselling. However everyone benefits more from focusing on enhancing skills and strengths and achieving goals than from focusing on problems. Thus, regardless of whether you feel that your life is together or falling apart, life coaching works better than counselling which seeks to explore and understand the roots of problems.
Some people also believe that if they are bothered by strong emotions, they should seek counselling or therapy rather than coaching. They may believe that a life coach would not have the emotional depth and experience to handle their issues. While this may sometimes be true, Dr. Linda Edwards is not only a life coach but also a registered psychologist with counselling experience dating back to 1976. Her accelerated emotional intelligence training techniques can be very effective in dealing with troublesome feelings and you can learn to use these techniques yourself so you don't have to keep going to a coach or a therapist. These techniques form the basis of her accelerated life coaching approach.
What Can I Expect From Accelerated Life Coaching?
Accelerated Life Coaching begins with establishing some inspiring goals. From then on, the focus is on achieving them. While coaching is a catalyst for amazing change, it is not magic. It does require hard work and commitment.
Ideally you have a session one hour per week in person or over the telephone for an agreed period, often three months. During each session, you agree to take actions for the following week at which time you discuss obstacles faced, insights gained, and with the help of constructive feedback which broadens your perspective, set new actions for tackling things in a different way.
Some of these new actions may require you to develop new habits. To accomplish this, you will need to be willing to step beyond your comfort zone as you are guided in the use of a wide range of empowering techniques intended to rapidly raise your emotional intelligence. It is these techniques which can rapidly speed up the usual coaching process.
Do I Need to Commit to a Three Month Program?
Not necessarily. That depends on you.
Some of Linda's clients have experienced profound changes in two to four sessions. In fact, her emotional intelligence training techniques can, in many cases, facilitate very significant changes in much less than three months. It is quite common for people to want a lot of benefit from a small investment. If you are ready to step well beyond your comfort zone, you may be one of the people who can actually do that.
However many people are quite resistant to putting themselves in uncomfortable situations. If this is true for you, it may well be realistic to plan for weekly sessions over three months in order to see the results you are looking for.
If you would like to clarify what you want to achieve and how fast you are comfortable to work toward your goals, call 9836 8629 and book an initial session. It is not uncommon for individuals to achieve one or two small goals as a consequence of this first session. But most importantly, you will be able to make a more informed decision about the optimal length of time for which you should engage in Accelerated Life Coaching to get the benefits you are looking for.
Career Mentoring
Do you want to:
- Develop the attitudes that make executives & professionals effective
- Feel at ease working with difficult clients and colleagues
- Eliminate most of your stress and prevent burnout
- Discover how to meet the people who are exceptionally helpful to you
- Overcome significant professional challenges
- Gain clarity about your goals and achieve them
- Receive safe, supportive encouraging guidance tailored to your unique needs
- Discover how to access the knowledge and passion you need from within yourself
Career Mentoring is for anyone who is not entirely satisfied with their work and would like to do something about it now. It uses a life coaching approach including emotional intelligence training techniques and is similar to what is described above in the section on Life Coaching except that it focuses on career issues.
Emotional Intelligence Training
Importance of Emotional Intelligence
Empowering emotional intelligence training techniques are the basis of Linda's life coaching, career mentoring and stress management programs because emotional intelligence is highly correlated with success in both the business and professional world and family and personal relationships. For more information on the nature and importance of emotional intelligence, go to our emotional intelligence page.
Credentials of Trainer
Dr Linda Edwards has a doctorate from Monash University in psychology and has mentored numerous senior executives and coached professionals who are leading in their field internationally. She has thousands of hours experience using her emotional intelligence training techniques and is convinced that her methods are at the forefront of rapid development of emotional intelligence. She is also an honorary research associate in psychology at Monash University with publications in professional journals and popular magazines.
Copyright Dr Linda Edwards 2002-2006, Art of Living Psychology, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia. (Consulting Rooms are in Melbourne in the Camberwell, Surrey Hills, Burwood and Canterbury region, also serving Ashburton, Balwyn, Box Hill, Glen Iris, Hawthorn, Kew and Malvern).
