In Ask Coach Tony, you can put my Operation Melt coaching to the test by asking me questions about how to achieve your goals.
Because a question asked by one is often a question had by many, I am regularly sharing these answers via the Operation Melt blog.
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I offer you this "dad joke" as a light "amuse-bouche" to entertain your mind before we get serious. My dad joke may be groan-worthy, but it's worth every penny you paid for it, right?
The Black Eyed Peas can sing us a song, but the chickpeas can only hummus one.
What Is Coaching: Real-Life Examples of Coaching In Action
Coach Tony: I know you are a coach, but I’m having trouble visualizing what that means in “real life.” Can you share some examples of the goals you’ve helped people achieve when coaching them?
Thanks for this question. I know coaching can be a little vague for people looking on from afar. The easiest way to get a better understanding of coaching is to set up a call, and we can discuss it. But I will do what I can to help with today’s post.
Here is how I describe coaching to current and potential clients:
A coach is someone trained and skilled in tools to help you achieve YOUR goals. They act as a partner, guide, cheerleader and sounding board during YOUR journey. Your coach is a member of YOUR team, meaning they are fully committed to YOUR success.
This means I have been trained and have experience with multiple tools and techniques, all intended to help clients assess their current realities, identify potential alternatives, create plans to achieve their new reality and help clear barriers and obstacles along the way. I want my clients to walk away from our relationship feeling like they are in control of their lives, that they have a plan and that success with their goals is within reach.
Before we jump into examples, I wanted to share a fun way to get a glimpse into my coaching. One of my books, Seasons of Transformation, tells the fictional story of Kate and her experience working with me. The coaching experience I share in that book is based on my actual coaching process. It’s a fun, engaging story and provides you an insider’s view into my coaching – I think you’ll love it.
Real-life Examples
I want to set the stage by letting you know I commit to confidentiality with my clients. As such, I won’t share specifics of my coaching relationships and successes today. What I can share are anonymous examples of the things I have worked on with my clients. I think this will still be valuable and won’t violate my confidentiality with my clients.
My coaching relationships with clients usually start by focusing on one of three areas:
- Health Coaching: how to improve your health, often including losing weight.
- Career/Leadership Coaching: how to grow and succeed in your professional endeavors.
- Life Coaching: how to build a plan to live your best life and eliminate the obstacles holding you back.
As I said, coaching engagements usually begin with a focus on one of those areas, though they often result in significant overlap between the three areas. Once we work together to assess your current reality, our coaching will focus on your top priorities.
Health Coaching
Multiple clients have engaged me to help them set and achieve health goals. Often, these goals include losing weight, but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, a client’s health journey with me begins with a desire to lose weight but evolves to include other health goals. Some examples of other health goals I have helped people achieve:
- Improving bloodwork with diet and exercise
- Getting moving and participating in a triathlon after joint replacement
- Increasing exercise and managing weight while simultaneously managing underlying diseases
- Sleeping better
- Managing stress through exercise, meditation and proactive self-talk
As you can see, these goals are diverse, as everybody’s journey is unique. Despite this diversity in goals, my coaching process can support each client’s journey as they commit to them, develop their plans and sprint to success.
Career/Leadership Coaching
A similarly diverse topic I help clients with is their career, job and leadership-related goals. It would be easy to think career coaching is simply helping people find new jobs, but that’s not the case. In fact, assisting clients with finding new jobs is the least common way I have supported their career journeys.
For many clients, my career coaching support has focused on helping them grow in their current jobs. For example, I have worked with several people who had recently become leaders of people and desired to improve their leadership skills. Several clients have asked me to help them navigate particularly challenging times at work due to politics, organizational changes or other stressors. Others have been working to define their desired career path and wanted support with exploring options and developing the appropriate strategies for achieving their desired new positions.
Finally, I have supported multiple clients in launching or growing their own businesses. Successfully starting a new side-hustle or primary business requires specific technical abilities and mindsets; most of us don’t learn these skills in school and need help doing so. I have assisted multiple clients with defining their goals for their new businesses, building a roadmap to achieve them and making progress one step at a time. Meanwhile, I also help clients develop a business owner mindset and confidence in their ability to succeed.
Again, career/leadership coaching clients have very diverse goals. My coaching process supported them as they pursued these diverse goals. My approach is based on project management, and, like all projects, the ability to tailor my process to the project is essential. That’s what I do every time.
Life Coaching
Sometimes, clients need a little more holistic support that is not directly focused on their health or career. This is when I provide general life coaching to my clients. With this form of coaching, I work with clients to create goals and a plan for where they want to go in their life. This includes identifying and managing underlying self-limiting beliefs, self-talk, personal stories, patterns, habits and other barriers preventing clients from living their best lives.
For example, after a significant turning point in one client’s life, I worked with them to develop a list of new goals and a new direction for this client’s life. These goals included job changes, a new home, travel, new relationships and new ways of thinking about life.
This is just one example of the goals I have helped people achieve through life coaching. I have many such examples as every coaching engagement involves some degree of general life coaching. My Operation Melt project management-based coaching process is ideally suited to helping clients in this manner.
I hope this summary of my coaching experiences is helpful for you and has demystified coaching a bit. More importantly, I hope this glimpse into how I have helped other clients has shown you that my coaching can help you, too. Are you ready to unlock the life of your dreams? Let’s work together to make it happen.
I believe in you; let me help YOU believe in you!
Meet Coach Tony
My name is Coach Tony, and I am a coach, author and project manager on a mission. I am working to build a world where no goal ever dies of loneliness.
I almost allowed one of my biggest life goals to die without ever being attempted for forty years. My goal almost died, not of failure but of loneliness. But, I took a risk and leveraged a simple, logical process that helped me wildly exceed my goal.
I transformed my life, and you can do the same with the help of Operation Melt.
Operation Melt provides engaging, practical content and hands-on coaching to inspire, motivate and equip project managers and other left-brained high-achievers to pursue and accomplish their biggest goals.
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