What coaching actually is

If you have never been coached, it is a hard thing to picture. This page is the plain version: what actually happens in a session, what tends to change and how to tell whether it is for you.

The short version

Coaching is a structured conversation with one job: helping you think more clearly about something that matters to you and then actually do something about it.

That really is it. What separates it from a good chat with a friend is that I have no stake in what you decide, no advice I am itching to give you and a way of asking questions that gets underneath the story you have already told yourself several hundred times.

It is a professional relationship rather than a friendly one and that is the point. Your friends love you and want you to be happy, which makes them terrible at asking you the awkward question.

What happens in an actual session

An hour, online, just the two of us. Roughly this shape, though never rigidly:

You bring something
A decision, a pattern, a person, a deadline, or simply “I do not understand why I keep doing this.” It does not need to be tidy. Half-formed is fine and often better.
We work out what you want from the hour
This takes five minutes and changes everything. It is frequently not the thing you opened with.
I ask questions
Some of them will be uncomfortable. That is generally a sign we have found the right place rather than the wrong one.
You leave with something to try
Small, specific and yours rather than mine. The change happens in the week that follows, not in the conversation itself.

There is no couch, no homework you will quietly resent and nobody telling you what your childhood means. You will not be asked to buy a planner.

What coaching is not

Most of the confusion about coaching comes from it being mistaken for three other things.

Not therapy: Therapy works largely with your past and with mental health. Coaching works with your present and where you are heading. They sit alongside each other perfectly well and plenty of my clients do both. If what you need is therapy, I will tell you and I will tell you early rather than take your money for six weeks first.
Not consulting: A consultant studies your problem and hands you their answer. I start from the assumption that the answer is already somewhere in you, usually underneath something you have not said yet.
Not mentoring: A mentor has done your job and tells you how they did it. I have not lived your life, which is exactly what makes me useful. I have no template of my own that I am quietly trying to fit you into.
Not being told what to do: If you want instructions, you will find coaching maddening. If you have had a lifetime of other people’s instructions and none of them fitted, you will probably find it a relief.

What changes

These are the things clients tell me afterwards, rather than a list of promises. Coaching is a collaboration and what you get out is related to what you bring.

You find out what you actually want

Not what you should want. Not what everyone around you assumed you wanted. Most people arrive with one problem and leave the first session having found the real one sitting underneath it.

Whatever is in the way gets smaller

A good deal of what stops people is not the obstacle itself but the version of it they have been carrying around unexamined. Said out loud to someone who asks about it properly, it often turns out to be far more negotiable than it looked.

You cannot unsee it

The shifts that last are not resolutions, which wear off by February. They are changes in how you see something. Once you have seen it the new way, the old way is simply no longer available to you.

Decisions get made

The one you have been circling for eight months. Coaching is unusually good at unsticking a decision, because most stuck decisions are not short of information. They are short of clarity about what matters.

You stop working against yourself

Once you understand how your attention, energy and motivation genuinely work, you can build around them instead of fighting them and calling it discipline.

The plan is yours, so you might actually follow it

A plan someone else designs for you gets abandoned quietly. One you built out of your own reasoning is one you understand well enough to adapt when circumstances change, which they will.

You see who is genuinely in your corner

Some relationships hold you up. Some quietly hold you back. It is not always the ones you would expect. Coaching tends to make it visible. What you then do about it stays entirely yours.

You get somewhere to say the difficult thing

The thought you cannot say to your board, your team, your partner or your mother. Said out loud once, in a room with no consequences, most difficult things become smaller and clearer.

Confidence you built rather than borrowed

Reassurance wears off in a day. Evidence that you handled something hard does not.

It spreads to things you did not come for

People arrive about a role, a decision or a diagnosis and report that something changed somewhere else entirely. Learning to think differently about one part of your life does not stay politely in its lane.

And the honest caveat

Coaching is not magic and it is not a treatment. It will not work if you are not genuinely up for it and it is not the right tool for a mental health crisis, an active addiction or a situation where you are unsafe. There is a real and growing evidence base for coaching, including for ADHD, but I will never sell it to you as a cure for anything. If something else would serve you better, I would rather say so on the free call than take your money and find out in week six.

How to tell whether it is the right time

You do not need to be in crisis to justify coaching and you do not need a clear goal before you start. Working out the goal is frequently the first piece of work. Any of these is enough:

You keep having the same conversation with yourself and never reaching the end of it
Something has changed — a role, a diagnosis, a relationship, a health condition — and the old version of you does not fit the new situation
You know exactly what you should be doing and you are not doing it
You are doing well on paper and it does not feel like it from the inside
You were diagnosed recently and are still working out what it means for how you live
You are the person everyone else brings their problems to and you have nowhere to take yours

How to choose a coach, including whether it should be me

Coaching is an unregulated industry in the UK. Anyone can call themselves a coach with no training whatsoever, which is worth knowing before you hand someone your money or your fourteen year old. The good news is that a few direct questions sort it out quickly.

Ask any coach you are considering, me included:

Where did you train and how long was the training?
Whose code of ethics do you work to?
Are you insured and for what?
Have you worked with someone in a situation like mine?
What happens if this is not working?
What does it cost and what exactly am I committing to?

Then talk to two or three people before you decide. I would genuinely rather you did. Fit matters more than credentials once the credentials are real and the only way to test fit is to have the conversation and notice how you feel afterwards.

For what it is worth, my own answers: I trained at the University of Cambridge and at ADDCA, I am a Credentialed ADHD Coach Professional (CACP) with the Professional Association for ADHD Coaches, I work to ICF and PAAC ethical standards and I hold professional and public liability insurance. The discovery call is free, it is a real conversation rather than a sales pitch and there is nothing to decline at the end of it.

The practical bits

Format: One hour, one to one, online. That means we work around your diary rather than your postcode.
Rhythm: Usually weekly for ten weeks to build momentum, then monthly once the thinking has traction. With younger clients we set the pattern around what is coming up, because an exam term needs a different rhythm from a quiet one.
Cost: From £130 per session. Where an employer is funding executive coaching the rate is £250. I keep a small number of subsidised places for genuine need.
Confidentiality: What you say stays with me, with three narrow exceptions set out in the coaching agreement and in the privacy notice: a legal requirement, a serious risk of harm, or disclosed illegal activity I am obliged to report.
Commitment: There is an agreement to sign, which is there to protect you as much as me. You are not locked into anything you cannot leave.

The only way to find out is to try one

No amount of reading about coaching will tell you what it is like to be coached. The discovery call is free, it lasts about half an hour and you are under no obligation at the end of it. Bring whatever is on your mind, or bring nothing and we will find it together.

Book a free discovery call

Not sure which kind of coaching fits? Have a look at the coaching paths or just ask me on the call.