Personal Transformation
Coaching

The course should take around 6 to 10 months to complete. However, there is no set end time and you may take as long as you need to complete it.

The course is of variable duration because it partly depends on how long it takes each student to complete his or her real-life coaching outside of the training weekends. We keep this open as we appreciate that our students are often full time employed or running their own business and so need to manage the training to suit their needs..

Absolutely! All of our courses are geared towards people who are either working full time, parenting full time or run their own business. Our aim is to ensure you can complete the course and become an expert in your chosen area of coaching or NLP without creating upheaval and unrealistic burdens on you. That’s why the training takes place at the weekend to avoid disrupting your working week and the support takes place online recognising that not everyone has the time to attend live events in the evenings.

At the moment all of our courses take place at the weekend as this means our students do not need to disrupt their working week. We appreciate that some people work at weekends or have commitments then but we have found that for the majority of people weekends are the best time to avoid taking annual leave to train with us.

The course is for people who want to use coaching independently as a life coach or executive coach or on a regular basis in the workplace. It gives an advanced level of coaching as needed by a coach working at a transformational level on the behavioural, cognitive and emotional levels of their clients. The course is for you if you enjoy working with people on their challenges and aspirations, if you’re curious about what makes people tick and how and why they do what they do. And

The course is different in many ways but our course difference is our focus on transformational change over a more superficial behavioural change. We train coaches to integrate a range of coaching styles to bring around transformation of the client’s perception. Where most coaching courses focus on behavioural change, we focus on helping the client exploring how they can change not only their behaviours but their thinking patterns and emotional responses. We teach a powerful combination of person-centred coaching, cognitive behavioural coaching and transactional analysis coaching techniques to ensure a deeper, richer experience for both coach and client.

Like many coaching schools, we used to teach the classic GROW model and it has its uses for simple performance coaching. But coaching as a profession has moved on in the 10 years since GROW was first formulated and we can now be far more sophisticated in how we work with clients. For us, GROW is outdated and more effective coaching can be had from a deeper understanding of the client’s model of the world.

Imagine learning to drive from a book and passing a written test. Then you take a real car out onto a real road! That would clearly be crazy and yet this happens a lot in coach training! For us, it’s important you have real experience and so as part of the course you will complete 30 hours of real-life coaching outside of the training environment. By coaching real-life clients you will gain the experience and confidence needed to continue as a coach after you qualify. Coaching is a practical skill and if you only learn it as theory you will almost certainly not be as effective as you could be and you will probably never use the skills in practice as you won’t have that foundation of having done it.

Practice clients can be found quite easily. On your first weekend we help you arrange “swaps” with your fellow coaches. We also have an active forum where people “offer” friends and family who would like coaching. Outside of these forums we find out students get their clients from a wide range of sources and we share these with you in out Coach’s Handbook.

The mentoring supports you with your coaching practice and with any other concerns you have on your path to qualification. Mentoring takes place monthly and allows you to discuss your client work in detail exploring where you have challenges as well as what is working well for you.

The Smart Zone is an online members area with hours of videos which cover the course material in detail allowing you to access it whenever and wherever you want to back up the live training.

We believe that coaching is fundamentally a human relationship skill and so do not require any written work for the course. We recognise that continuous learning will always improve your skills as a coach but we don’t believe that making you write essays demonstrates your ability to connect with your clients and create positive coaching sessions.

To qualify you need to attend all four weekends of live, complete your 30 hours of live coaching hours and submit a live coaching session for assessment by the head of the course.

We ensure that we keep our groups small enough that the trainer can have close engagement with each member of the group to ensure you’re on track and getting what you need from the training. On our Coaching Excellence courses, our groups are never larger than 24 people with the starter weekend of being around 8 to 12 people.

The Coaching Excellence course is 48 hours of live training. The total study time is around 105 hours including completion of the case study coaching, reflective learning, online videos, mentoring and webinars.