What is coaching?

The term "coach" originally comes from English and literally means "carriage". So a coach is the one who helps others to move forward or change. The concept of coaching first became known to a broader public through competitive sport, in which a coach comprehensively supports a competitive athlete, i.e. psychologically and beyond the purely technical and athletic part.

According to the definition of the leading coaching associations, coaching is “professional advice, guidance, and support for people with management/control functions and for experts in companies and organizations. The objective of coaching is the further development of individual or collective learning and performance processes for professional or personal concerns.” (Deutscher Verband für Coaching und Training).

Based on my +10 years of experience as a coach and having been on the client side multiple times, too, I consider the most important and valuable elements of coaching to be the following:

• the act of you fully committing to creating a change or even transformation that feels meaningful to you which goes hand in hand with you committing your time, energy, and money to your work
• solidifying this commitment by entering a partnership with a coach that you trust and that feel you can be absolutely honest with
• a safe space both inside the coaching session as well as in the communication between sessions where the coach’s attention and focus is 100% on you and helping you achieve your goals
• facilitation of your best thinking and problem-solving to develop one or several action plans to reach your goals, dreams, desires, and visions, as well as the coach’s best thinking without directive advice
• total acceptance of you with no judgment and encouragement of emotional expression and release
• interaction with you not as who you’ve been in the past but as the person you are in this moment and the person you are committed to becoming
• accountability and reminders whenever you stray off your intended path as well as support throughout situations with low motivation or low energy

How does 1-1 coaching with me work?

Private coaching is the most personalized service that I offer.

I act as a guide on your journey, help you understand what you want and need from your career or your business, and help you create real-life changes so that you can feel happy, motivated, and fulfilled in your work life (again).

Every 1-1 coaching is different because it’s 100% tailored to you.

With some of my clients, the focus is more on exploring their perceptions and behaviors and how these are holding them back from living up to their full potential, both at work and in their personal life. My coaching is informed by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy which is based on the key idea that what you think and do affects the way you feel (emotionally and physically) and vice versa. In these contexts, my clients work a lot on overcoming limiting beliefs that are holding them back from reaching their work-life goals as well as identifying patterns of self-sabotage and using neuroplasticity to reprogram them into more helpful mechanisms.

With other clients, the emphasis is more on the technical career or business side of their challenge. These clients crave a much better understanding of their market and industry and lack information and data to make smart decisions. Often, this type of client is also missing strategies and tools to translate their goals into effective actions, e.g. how to write a business plan and set up a business or: how to design a successful job application strategy and build a career progression plan that serves their personal vision. Last but not least, I like to point these clients to opportunities that they didn’t even think of or thought were impossible or unrealistic for them.