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I have been working in corporate leadership roles for many years. And one of the areas of my work that I like the most is coaching people.
Seeing people around me achieve their goals and be happy and proud about it is very rewarding.
In 2022, I had the opportunity to be coached by a professional coach.
Her facilitation helped me to find my way to navigate some challenges I was facing and to get the best possible outcomes out of it.
This experience also made me realize that my way of coaching others could be improved.
And that’s when I decided to become a certified coach myself.
But what exactly is coaching?
According to the International Coaching Federation (ICF), the main difference between coaching, mentoring, and therapy is the approach used to help someone address a challenge.
A coach is a partner that will help the clients to set and achieve their own objectives.
The main job of the coach is to create a safe space for the clients to reflect on their goals and which are the resources they already have to move from the current to a desired state.
It is a future-oriented process, where the coach explores and challenges the clients’ beliefs to unlock their potential.
A mentor, on the other hand, is a subject-matter expert, someone that went through a similar situation and is expected to provide guidance on how to solve certain problems.
The mentorship process might include or not some coaching.
Finally, a therapist is trained to heal pain, usually focusing on “resolving difficulties arising from the past that hamper an individual’s emotional functioning in the present”.
My search for the perfect coach training
I wanted to focus on coaching because one of my core beliefs is that each person has the right to choose the life they want to live – and that my role, as a friend or a manager, is to empower them to achieve that.
But what would be the perfect coach training for me? There are so many options in the market! (type “coach training” in Google and you will see what I mean)
I decided to start my search by looking for high-credibility institutions, that, I believed, would point me in the right direction.
There are two highly respected international coaching organizations, the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).
As a medium-term goal, I would like to get certified by them as well. So I started looking for coach training that would also prepare me for the ICF and EMCC credentials.
The ICF website was a huge step toward finding the perfect course.
On their Education Services Search page, I was able to find many options that would meet my basic criteria: remote training, with a practical approach and delivered in English.
To refine my search, my next step was to find a course that spanned at least 3 months. I wanted to have time to absorb the content during the process of studying.
This required me to reach out directly to my three favorite providers on the ICF list. Two of them offered me free video-chat consultations, which immediately brought them to the top of my list.
I chose Solutions Academy for three main reasons:
- very well structured: regular classes with a small number of students starting regularly in many different time options
- perfect fit to my “spanned time” desire: 60 hours of training delivered in a 2h per week format during six months
- the methodology they use, “Solutions Focused”, seemed to be a perfect fit for my values and beliefs.
As a bonus, by joining Solutions Academy I was also becoming part of a very international group of students and professional coaches (which also fits very well into my personal preferences).
What I got from the training
My classes started in October 2022 and were completed by March 2023.
The coaching methodology I studied is based on the “Solutions Focused Approach”, developed from 1978 to 2007 in the US, under the leadership of two social workers, Insoo Kim Berg and Steve de Shazer.
Based on previous studies developed by the Mental Research Institute (MRI), they founded the Brief Family Therapy Center (BFTC).
Their main interest was to help people to achieve their goals within their environments, rather than trying to explain to people why they act in certain ways.
Some of the principles of their approach were:
- each case is different, and is the result of the interactions between a unique person and their unique environment;
- the solution is not necessarily linked to the problem: the therapist can help the client to achieve their goals without knowing all the details of the problem
- the clients are the expert on their own lives and have the resources to get what they want;
- better and faster results are achieved when the clients build upon what is already working (in opposition to trying to fix what is broken);
- we can help clients to tell their stories in a way that makes them stronger;
- small steps can lead to big changes.
Solutions Academy developed a coaching approach based on these principles.
The result is a coaching methodology that focuses more on what is happening in the interactions of the client with its environment than on what is going on inside the client’s mind.
I am really happy with the training I took. I could write pages and pages about what I love in this approach.
Long story short, I love it because I finally found a methodology that supports my favorite approach to life: clarify what you want and take the first small step in the right direction.
What is next?
By mid 2023 I got my first coaching certification by completing Coaching Fundamentals, the 60h course I took at Solutions Academy.
As part of the process, in addition to the training hours, I practiced. And, to ensure I was doing a good job, I had a mentor who assessed the quality of three different coaching sessions delivered by me.
This allowed me to successfully complete my training.
Now, it is time to put in practice what I have learned. I have been coaching friends and friends of friends for some time now, and the experience has confirmed that this was the right decision for me.
You can check some testimonials here. And, if you think you could benefit from being coached by me, feel free to reach out 😉
