Why am I a counsellor and coach?

Why am I a counsellor and coach?

A friend of mine once said that I am “a natural.” I assumed what he meant was that I am good with people and I agree with him that I am, but counselling or coaching requires more that just being good with people. It also requires training and my training started about 20 years ago.

What is my training?

My training started with Psychotherapy. This can be described as a way of working that uses psychological principles for the purpose of assisting people to modify their behaviours, cognitions, emotions to enable them to achieve their desired outcome.

Then my training evolved into adding a Systemic approach. Humans do not live in isolation, we live as part of a system. Our families are a system and that system influences our behaviour, cognition and emotion. We come into this world with our personalists, but our environment has an impact on this.

The environment can either nurture or hinder our growth, can influence how we think and how we behave with ourselves and with others and how we form relationships. A great deal of my work is with relationships, whether it be with couples or families.

Through my work I became involved in a project that involved working short term with women who were in abusive relationships. Prior to this project a great deal of my work had been long term. Being involved in this I discovered that by using more of a coaching skills I could work more affectively.

The next step was becoming a Coach.

Adding coaching to my capabilities has meant I work more creatively to enabling change. I work in a collaborative solution-focused, results-orientated way. My approach can be more direct at times, or it cannot depending on what is required. As a coach I work to facilitate change and growth. Coaching has given me are more tools, more skills and more ways to assist people to achieve what they are wanting.  

I am now also a NLP practitioner, as by using some NLP tools and techniques with my coaching I can facilitate change more affectively.

So going back to what my friend said, I am “a natural” who also now has a great deal of knowledge, skills and expertise to enable people to create a better future for themselves.