Professional coaching focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes and managing personal change. Other service professions, like consulting and psychotherapy, are based on the wisdom and expertise of the professional. In coaching you—the client—are the expert. Your coach’s role is to ask powerful questions, act as a sounding board, provide objective assessment and observations, listen fully and actively, challenge your blind spots, and foster shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives.

Is there an upcoming opportunity or challenge that you want to leverage? Do you feel “stuck” on the path to achieving your goals? These are two excellent examples of topics to bring to a coaching conversation.

Other common reasons for partnering with a coach include:

• Optimizing work performance
• Expanding career opportunities
• Increasing self-esteem/self-confidence
• Maximizing potential
• Defining strengths and weaknesses
• Improving business management strategies
• Managing work/life balance

The most successful coaching partnerships begin with a client who has a clear idea of what they want to accomplish and is open to collaboration and new perspectives.

As a coaching client, your role is to:

• Create the coaching agenda based on personally meaningful goals
• Assume full responsibility for your own decisions and actions
• Use the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and fresh perspectives
• Engage big-picture thinking and problem-solving skills
• Take the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by your coach and engage in effective forward action