Coaching is about increasing your capacity to live into your full potential and an abundant life.  It is about discovery, awareness, and choice.  It is about turning your dreams into goals and your goals into reality.  Coaching is about moving closer and closer to what you consider a fulfilling life, at work, at home, at play, and in the world.  It is also about transformation.  And it is about living into the call you are discovering, following, have forgotten, want to renew, or are even running from.

Sometimes it is easier to understand what coaching is by looking at what it is not.  While coaching may on occasion use similar techniques to some of these more familiar helping professions, coaching is not and does not replace the need for help from any of these professionals.

Coaching is not … Consulting. The consultant is the one who brings specialized expertise to a working relationship. A coach helps you generate your own solutions from your own expertise.

Coaching is not … Mentoring. A mentor is one with wisdom and knowledge who guides a less experienced person. A coach taps your own experience and innate wisdom, honoring you as the expert in your own life.

Coaching is not … Training. A trainer imparts knowledge from a learning path based on an established curriculum. A Coach’s curriculum is simply to stay fully present to you and walk with you down a path of discovery.

Coaching is not … Counseling. To get to healing, counselors often focus on the past and start with a person’s dysfunction or brokenness. Coaching stays in the present, assumes health, and is always about forward movement leading to action.

Coaching is not … Spiritual Direction. A spiritual director focuses on one’s relationship with God and life in the spirit. Coaching may encompass your spiritual nature, but the primary goal is forwarding action.

Coaching is not mentoring, training, or consulting.  Coaching is not counseling or spiritual direction. In each of these helping modalities, the expertise is vested in the “other.” With coaching, you are the expert about yourself.