Coaching for Achievement is a supportive, organized process for helping you achieve a goal. The goal may be an educational goal, an occupational or career goal, an economic goal, a relationship goal, a service goal, a goal in your avocation, a goal of change within yourself–any goal you choose. Coaching is not therapy; its goal is to maximize your performance, and give you an experience of success.

Coaching begins with questions that make your goal well-defined and achievable, and make the reasons you have chosen that goal clear. You are encouraged to be self-reflective and utterly honest about your hopes and fears, about the difficulties you have had pursuing the goal, about the strengths and vulnerabilities in your typical behavior that will make the goal easier or harder to achieve. We will discuss how to modify your thinking and your behavior to avoid or overcome the blocks you anticipate and that you meet along the way. Goals are often modified and refined as the process continues.

We define steps needed toward the goal, making specific plans on a timeline for taking those steps. The steps include research, experimentation, journaling–only positive, inspiring journaling–and making contacts you need to make. We deal with anxieties, but do not let them control your behavior. We teach you to use your success in meeting small goals along the way to support your motivation and experience of progress. We use techniques such as imaginative rehearsal to maximize commitment, and promote positive rather than negative anticipation, an important factor in engaging all of your energy and mind toward achievement. You engage in exercises that help us identify what works for you, and what doesn’t.

Coaching involves frequent brief contact to help you stay on track; this teaches you how to maintain your commitment and stay accountable to the process and to yourself. It requires a determination to rely on discipline, not only on feelings of motivation, to get you where you want to go.

The coaching process will teach you not only how to achieve the goal you have chosen, but how to approach defining and successfully pursuing goals in the future. It is a process that teaches you how to make what you WANT in your life more important than what you fear.

If you are interested in coaching, contact me; the time commitment and the fee are different than for therapy, and we can make a workable plan.