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Proud to be recognised! |
I recently wrote about the fact it was our fourth birthday. Shortly after I was celebrating more than I could have expected as the school received a strong of incredible professional endorsements and recognition.
Shortly after the fourth anniversary, I heard from the most prestigious of all coaching bodies, the International Coach Federation, that our coaching course had been approved! This was nine months coming and I can’t tell you how proud we were. This was a huge step which recognised what I, my trainers and, most importantly, our students knew already which is that the Smart School is providing a genuinely cutting-edge, quality programme which creates exceptional coaches.
But it didn’t stop there. We then received endorsement from the Institute of Leadership and Management, showing that our coaching programme is fully in tune with needs of the corporate world as well as that of personal coaching. After all, the fact is that people are in corporations are, well….people! They share the same need to overcoming limiting beliefs, self-doubt, unclear outcomes and so much more. The recognition from the UK’s largest awarding body for leadership and management qualifications puts us squarely in the centre of change for organisations.
Finally, reco
gnising the holistic approach we take to personal change, we were awarded recognition by the Complementary Therapists Association.
So it’s been quite a month!
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4 years old this month – a message to our students |
The Smart School is 4 years old this month! In August 2008, I had the idea to create my own coaching school. Just an idea and I incorporated the business the next day. The Smart School concept was born.
4 years!! I can’t believe it! I have normally got bored and started a new business by around 3 years but I’m still as excited about the Smart School as the day I first created it!
Anyway, it got me thinking about what I see happening around me. Do you mind if I celebrate for a moment?
It’s really wonderful to see so many people beginning to strike out on their own and create profitable practices. From Catherine Watkin with Selling from the Heart to Sonia Gill with Heads Up. From Nick Hardy with the Secret Shepherd to Ruth Ruth Karuna Lawson and Mandy Lagan with Foundation Tree. From Holly Worton with Tribal to Esme Witbooi over in South Africa!
This is what I never saw in my old conference business – the difference we make.
And then there are the people who are a part of the beating heart of the school: Paul Kensett, Peggy Guglielmino, Catherine Watkin and Robert Stephenson. When I first started the school, I did EVERYTHING from the bookkeeping to the training, the sales to the admin! But now I have team I can be proud of and a team in the background who you guys never see: the SEO and web guys, the admin team and phone handlers, the bookeeper and social media connector. What a difference! I get to relax……a bit 
But of course I don’t relax too much – I’m not a laurels rester-onner! And so we now have the development of some amazing programmes in Rapid Results Business Coaching, Person Centred NLP and Dynamic Youth Coaching. And 2013 will see some fascinating developments with larger transformational events.
And then finally, of course, there is you! Each one of you is making a difference in the world and sometimes in the heat of battle to survive in what is still a rough and tumble economy, I forget that. So I want to say thank you. Thank you for trusting us, thank you for sharing the experience and thank you for caring enough to make a difference.
Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, take a moment to appreciate what you do. Because I appreciate you. Thanks for being part of the journey so far.
Filed Under From the Director's Chair
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Parental messages in coaching |
I was thinking today how people live their lives based upon the messages that they would have received from parenting.
Within coaching sessions these messages come out in the way that people self-sabotage what they set out to do and achieve.
This is almost always subconscious and automatic and through coaching we help people understand in how they might be doing this, where this comes from and, importantly, help them to move forward from some of these self defeating patterns.
A very interesting part of transformational coaching is looking at the realm of Transactional Analysis.
Many people will know the book Games People Play by Eric Berne, which brought the idea of TA to the modern world.
One part of TA it looks at the concept of injunctions.
What are these?
Simply put they are unconscious messages that we pick up on as children from our parents. Read more
Filed Under Transformational Coaching
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Russian Dolls in NLP |
was reading a blog this morning on NLP and they mentioned how a lot of practitioners don’t know what process or technique to use with their clients. Because they are focused on the processes rather than being focused on the person’s needs.
When I train my Person Centred NLP course, I remind my students that I’m only teaching them those NLP processes so they can later on draw on them or even more importantly use only part of them to match the needs that their clients bring into the session.
This morning my client came in requesting my help to deal with her recent break up. She was still hanged onto the guy, felt angry with him and didn’t feel she could manage alone to move on. So I thought of doing a couple of grieving processes, such as the De-cording one (invented I believe by Connirae Andreas) as well as a lovely process I call The Cloud that involves identifying what the person got from the relationship and access those resources in a more direct way.
In the middle of the de-cording process, my client got stuck in her anger for her ex, and decided she needed to let go of that feeling before being able to move further. So I drew part of Dilts’s reimprinting process, giving her inner representation of her ex-boyfriend the resources he was missing in order to be able to symbolically handle the break up the way my client needed.
But as soon as that part was dealt with, she got in touch with the remnant of a limiting belief we’ve addressed last week, that she is not worthy of love. We had performed a lovely reimprinting process on that belief in our last session, got some amazing shifts, and she just needed to recall the new empowering words of her Dad that we had created during that process.
We then went back to the decording process and she felt she couldn’t let go fully of her ex. Because this time she needed the grieving Cloud process, even though I had planned to do it after the decording. So off we went into the Cloud, in order to finish the decording, using bits of reimprinting here and there.
I finished the session future pacing my client, and that’s when we realised she needed to do the re-cording bit of her decording process with the symbolic future man of her life. So we worked on her future timeline, linking her with her new potential partner whilst finishing the future pacing.
I felt I was playing with russian dolls all along integrating one process in another, and my clients concluded the session feeling much better and able to let go of her past relationship. I don’t believe she would have been able to go there so quickly if I had only used a standard process the way I had been taught. It’s a little bit like juggling, you need different balls in order to make it work.
Let me know your thoughts on which processes you find useful to combine for the good of your clients!
Filed Under NLP & Hypnotherapy
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Youth Coaching and The Olympics |
So there I am getting ready to take the children, all of them, well I say all, there are about nine of us, heading to the museums and parks for picnics. When I catch a bit of the Olympic news.
The Team GB cycling coach is there talking about the philosophy behind creating awesome cyclist. How they looked at how to make someone the best they could be, then applied that to the cycle track, exploring how to make them the best clclist they could be.
The presenter asked, could you apply this to other sports, and he replies, yes you can apply it to anything, because at the heart of it, it’s about making the person the best they can be, then taking that to the sport or the job.
And that’s how youth coaching works, we look at the young person, and explore how they can be the best at being themselves, then look into how this ripples into their world.
Sport has always been a place where young people are able to understand the dedication and focus it takes to be the best, perhaps as youth coaches we need to take some of that focus and dedication and apply it to coaching and mentoring. Breaking down the skill sets needed to be the best, looking at whether the young person is a sprinter or along distance runner. Taking personality types and relating them to sports…at the moment it’s a thought, perhaps there is someone out there already doing this, and I would love to hear from them.
But right now, everyone is ready for the museum, so I’d better publish this post, and while I’m out and about today the thoughts of youth coaching, sports and performance will float around and perhaps a new model will emerge or an old model revamped.
I’d love to hear your thoughts as I’ve seen a few posts about the Olympics and motivation, and youth.
Filed Under Youth Coaching
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