Coaching is an amazing, transformative experience. It provides the chance to enhance and grow your best qualities. You’ll learn about what really matters to you, how you wish to live and how to take practical steps towards your goals. Coaching is flexible encompassing life, relationship, study, creativity, and business issues. It is a journey in which you learn about yourself, how you can be effective in achieving goals and getting what you need, and how you can grow and create the life you want.

Psychologists have many years of supervised study and training in understanding all facets of human behaviour and working to Improve wellbeing and resilience to encourage personal growth and thriving. They are also registered with professional bodies.

Coaching psychology has emerged from a desire to bring positive psychology into peoples’ lives. The approaches have come out of the work done in the fields of positive psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, and positively focused psychotherapy. As a qualified psychologist, I’m highly trained in using skill development techniques, positive psychology, goal-setting and motivational processes, and working with blocks to progress. I understand how our cognitive processes and physiology interacts with our day-to-day thoughts, feelings and behaviour and use this knowledge to help people identify their strengths and develop skills so they can live a more fulfilling life.

People often fear seeing a psychologist as they think they must have something very wrong with them or that they will be made to explore childhood or other traumas. However, this is not the focus of the work we would do together. A coaching psychology session is basically a conversation with purpose, where you can gain a sense of perspective and clarity and develop some tools to improve your life. My mission is wellbeing, not problem management. However, I am skilled and experienced in recognising mental wellbeing issues and knowing when to refer to a therapist.

Training and teaching involve the transfer of skills and knowledge to the learner. The trainer or teacher is the expert. As a coaching psychologist, I will acknowledge you as the expert on your life, experiences, and perspectives. I will not give you give answers but will guide with the right questions. One size doesn’t fit all, so I will explore your present, help you focus on your goals and work with you to design your future path. This is your journey, and I will be asking you to work actively on this. The reward is that you will learn and grow during the process; it will certainly be worth the effort.

There are very few down sides to coaching. We’re not doing therapy, so the focus is not on what’s wrong. The focus is instead on what’s right, and how you can keep that in your life and make it better. There is always risk in everything, though. One risk is that you might feel awkward or uncomfortable as we begin to work on where you want to improve. However, it’s hard to move forward if you don’t know where your starting point is

Coaching may bring up some things that you might want to avoid, or things that might be better served by therapy. Avoidance is one thing that comes up a lot in coaching; it’s easy to want to avoid change. That is something we can work on in the process of analysing blocks and obstacles.

Severe emotional distress, relationship problems, possible mental illness are things that need to be explored with a therapist. If these issues come up in coaching, I will advise and guide you on seeking this support.

No. As a coaching psychologist, I want you to be autonomous and achieve what you want. I will make it clear from the start that you are responsible for and own the results of the coaching process. Coaching works to make the client more self-reliant, personal strength aware and improve self-efficacy.

At the end of a coaching session, I will encourage you to ask yourself if you have learned something new about yourself and gained clarity on your situation.  While I would never claim that coaching can lead to immediate epiphanies, I do believe you should feel like you’re gaining a bit more clarity on your situation with an initial or each progressive session.  You should feel like you’re gaining a new awareness about yourself, to enable new actions and new results in your life.

Of course. In any kind of helping profession, you should be able to ask questions, get information, or get a feel for what the work is like. I offer a free 20-minute phone conversation, so I can answer questions, give you a small sample of what coaching might look like and look at how we can work together. I also offer a discounted, 1-time only session on identifying goals, so you can get a small taste of how this works. If coaching is something you want to do, and are interested in exploring, I want to make it as easy and worthwhile for you to explore.