What is Holistic Business Coaching and How Can It Help Me?

What is Business Coaching and How Can It Help Me?

• Has your small business stalled?

• Are you stuck in roles that don't utilize your time effectively?

• Are you dealing with stress, anxiety, too much work?

• Are you planning a change to your business model or a business partnership and wanting to give yourself the best chance of success?

• Are you feeling like a fraud and have lost confidence in yourself?

• Do you worry you are out-of-touch with how best to run and/or scale your business?

• Are you thinking about balancing business growth with the rest of your life?

These are just some of the situations where business coaching could help you.

What are the key areas for business coaching?

Business coaching is a way of helping someone to overcome a challenge they are facing in their business. Different business coaches have different business challenges that they support with.

I specialize in a holistic approach mixing life & executive coaching techniques with planning support and the implementation of systems for operational efficiency.

• Helping someone to identify prioritize and develop focus and good habits that drive execution

• Helping someone to change elements of their business or take risks (e.g. identifying their values, working through ideas and developing a plan of action)

• Helping someone to feel more confident to take critical business decisions (this often involves them overcoming a particular challenge).

How does it work?

The coaching program length will differ depending on your objectives.

Following a 30-min consultation, to ensure you're a good fit with me and my practice, I invite you to start with 3x 1-hour sessions. After each session, I'll share detailed notes, next steps and exercises, where relevant, that help support and/or accelerate your progress.

I encourage you to approach each Discovery Session with an open mind. In my experience, the more a client tries to press results, the further they may stray from meaningful progress. Pressing for money works in a similar way. You're best off approaching each session relaxed, ready to be honest and thoughtfully engaged with my trained facilitation.

At the conclusion of the third session, I'll invite you to another free 30-minute 'Review Session'. This serves as our opportunity to reflect on progress and decide whether continuing our work together is something we both agree is worthwhile to support your personal and/or professional objectives. If so, I'd prepare a customized recommendation.

There is no set duration to the support programs I design - they're always personalized to your objectives and circumstances.

All my sessions take place remotely via Google Meets.

How often do coaching sessions take place? 

In my practice, the frequency of your sessions is driven by you, via a link to my calendar. That said, you will need time to digest each session, work through exercises, and/or taking agreed actions. The most common iteration is weekly or every other week. I wouldn’t leaver longer than a month between sessions, as the momentum and impact will be lost if too much time passes between sessions.

As a business coach, do you give advice?

Traditional coaching (as defined by the Association for Coaching and the International Coach Federation) involves helping the client to find their own answers to their challenges and avoiding giving advice.

But business coaching is different. I’ve logged 1400+ hours of coaching experience and pull from 15+ years of corporate experience across 7 different businesses large and small to guide and advise my clients. In this aspect, the role is rather more mentoring than traditional coaching. So perhaps the correct title should be business coach/mentor.

I believe that in business coaching, there are times when it is crucial to give advice. For example, when I help a client to improve their approach to talent acquisition, I freely share my experience and knowledge of what to look for, based on the role they're hiring for and the type of business they lead. And when helping someone to improve their processes, it’s essential that I advise them on how to balance checks and balances with agility and automation. I’d be failing my clients if I didn’t deliver this kind of guidance.

But when it comes to the more instinctive issues (for example, helping someone to uncover their true business goals, work out how to deal with a particular situation, decide on whether or not to change their business model, or build their confidence), it’s more powerful to help a client to solve their own challenge without imposing advice or opinion – which could easily be subjective.  This is where the traditional coaching model and an objective, unbiased stance, is the most impactful.

The crucial thing is to give my client the time to talk through what they’re finding challenging. I listen carefully to what they say and then ask them powerful or insightful questions to help them get unstuck and move forward in their thinking. I also have certain activities or worksheets they can complete to help fast-track a client’s thinking or help them navigate through a particular business challenge.

Although I won’t give advice in these circumstances, I may share useful books, articles, talks, podcasts or courses for my client to consider, if I think this will help to expand their understanding or business capability (for example, leadership techniques, software solutions, productivity tools).

Is everything discussed during a coaching session confidential?

Absolutely, yes. Clients can trust that nothing they share with me will be discussed with anyone else.

You mentioned your own breadth of experience – how can this help the coaching client?

Business coaches have varied experience and generally they will coach around their specific areas of experience or training. I’m lucky to have worked in a broad range of businesses and supported people to build creative businesses, coaching practices and even more complex, larger operations in the medical, real estate, financial and IT/Tech product sectors.

All that said, you will need to be or become the expert in your chosen field. I can offer next steps and exercises to help organize your knowledge development but I don't believe in coaching that serves as a crutch enabling laziness.

I work with highly motivated small business owners that feel stuck or feel inspired to up their game and want to partner with someone like me to introduce new ideas and ensure follow through using a holistic approach.

If you would like to find out more about how business coaching could help you, contact me by email, or book a free 30-minute consultation.