My coaching approach

Finding a coach who meets your needs can feel a bit overwhelming. As the coaching sector has rapidly grown in recent times, so too has the range of coaching approaches, methods and models used by coaches in their practice.

I believe it’s important for clients to know about the approaches I use and the psychological theory that supports their efficacy.

Our careers are dynamic and influenced by personal, organisational and social factors. That’s why I use systems and narrative coaching techniques, as these methods can help us to gain broader and deeper insights into our current career opportunities and challenges.

Outcomes of systems coaching

  • A deeper understanding of your organisation’s cultures, and increased self-awareness of your own impact.

  • Developing new perspectives on work related issues, and increased confidence to respond to organisational challenges.

  • An understanding of your leadership style and your impact as a leader.

Systems coaching

Coaching is a learning process and systemic or systems coaching facilitates learning about your social and organisational context. This helps you identify different perspectives, access deeper thinking and allows you to consider new possibilities when thinking about your career-related issues.

Organisations are systems made up of people, cultures and relationships. In our coaching we work with the organisational system to explore your career-related topics. In an increasingly complex world of work, looking at systems-wide information expands the coaching work beyond personal and individual factors.

Using systems coaching we will:

  • Explore the dynamics, environment and culture of your organisation.

  • Develop a relational map of your organisation, looking at your networks and leadership skills.

  • Identify what’s within your sphere of influence and how you want to make an impact.

Outcomes of narrative coaching

  • A deeper understanding of your work values, work style preferences and intrinsic motivations.

  • Clarity on your strengths, skills and competencies.

  • A revised work identity that supports you now and meets your current career goals.

Narrative coaching

Narrative coaching is empowering for clients because it creates a space to explore meaning from work experiences and embraces the evolving nature of our careers.

Narrative coaching methods places an emphasis on storytelling. Much career coaching methods now use the power of stories and constructing work identities to help clients to move forward in their careers, particularly when a client is seeking a promotion or career transition. This is because the stories we tell about ourselves can act as a powerful driving force and resource to support a new career move or career change.

We all use narratives and stories to construct our work identities – to sell our skills and tell prospective employers who we are and what motivates us. Increasingly our work identity is fluid not fixed and we will change job roles and careers many times throughout our working lives. When an existing narrative is no longer serving its purpose, it can hold us back from moving forward and create a feeling of being stuck.

Career coaches who use narrative coaching in their practice work with clients to re-author their work identity story to achieve new career objectives and goals. We do this by working together to identify your “micro narratives” that you want to use to reconstruct your current work narrative to help you move forward with your future career ambitions.

Using narrative coaching we will:

  • Explore your work values, work style preferences and intrinsic motivations.

  • Examine your strengths, skills and competencies.

  • Construct a future career story.