TimberWolf Business Coaching
The Top 4 Most Common Questions:
(Summary for busy executives, for details read the following pages)
- What is Executive Coaching?
A way to move you toward your goals faster, get unstuck, and develop your strengths.
- What is the difference between coaching and consulting?
Consultants give you their expertise set.
Coaches help develop yours.
- Why would I hire an executive coach?
All successful executives work with a coach or mentor to keep them focused, accountable, and moving forward.
The President has a cabinet for a good reason.
- What makes you different?
I have a unique skill set that includes over 30 years of business experience and coaching, combined with public speaking, sales training, and teaching.
The following article will give you further clarity.
Call today to discuss your goals and see if we are a good fit. No obligation. No pressure.
WHY WOULD YOU HIRE AN EXECUTIVE COACH?
Many people ask what the difference is between coaching and consulting. There are times when either or both are necessary to move a business forward.
This is how the International Coach Federation explains the difference between Coaching and other service professions:
ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential, which is particularly important in today’s uncertain and complex environment. Coaches honor the client as the expert in his or her life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful and whole. Standing on this foundation, the coach’s responsibility is to:
- Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve
- Encourage client self-discovery
- Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
- Hold the client responsible and accountable
This process helps clients dramatically improve their outlook on work and life, while improving their leadership skills and unlocking their potential.
Professional coaching focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes and managing personal change. Sometimes it’s helpful to understand coaching by distinguishing it from other personal or organizational support professions.
- Therapy: Therapy deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or in relationships. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past that hamper an individual’s emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with the present in more emotionally healthy ways. Coaching, on the other hand, supports personal and professional growth based on self-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is future focused. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one’s work or personal life. The emphases in a coaching relationship are on action, accountability, and follow through.
- Consulting: Individuals or organizations retain consultants for their expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, the assumption is the consultant will diagnose problems and prescribe and, sometimes, implement solutions. With coaching, the assumption is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.
- Mentoring: A mentor is an expert who provides wisdom and guidance based on his or her own experience. Mentoring may include advising, counseling and coaching. The coaching process does not include advising or counseling, and focuses instead on individuals or groups setting and reaching their own objectives.
- Training: Training programs are based on objectives set out by the trainer or instructor. Though objectives are clarified in the coaching process, the individual or team being coached, with guidance provided by the coach sets them. Training also assumes a linear learning path that coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear without a set curriculum.
- Athletic Development: Though sports metaphors are often used, professional coaching is different from sports coaching. The athletic coach is often seen as an expert who guides and directs the behavior of individuals or teams based on his or her greater experience and knowledge. Professional coaches possess these qualities, but their experience and knowledge of the individual or team determines the direction. Additionally, professional coaching, unlike athletic development, does not focus on behaviors that are being executed poorly or incorrectly. Instead, the focus is on identifying opportunity for development based on individual strengths and capabilities.
An individual or team might choose to work with a coach for many reasons, including but not limited to the following:
- Something urgent, compelling or exciting is at stake (a challenge, stretch goal or opportunity)
- A gap exists in knowledge, skills, confidence or resources
- A desire to accelerate results
- A lack of clarity with choices to be made
- Success has started to become problematic
- Work and life are out of balance, creating unwanted consequences
- Core strengths need to be identified, along with how best to leverage them
I am a coach.
I have 30+ year of experience in various businesses, so when necessary I can provide some consulting, but I believe that you, as the business professional, have the knowledge, skills, and ability to be successful. My job as a coach is to support and honor you in that process.
Since I am not primarily a consultant, I will not attempt to tell you how to run your business. I will not come in with a cookie-cutter business system. And, I will not sell you a manual and workbook then leave you stranded.
Working together we will:
- Help you develop your unique strengths
- Help you refine your goals and accelerate results
- Bridge any gaps in knowledge, skills, confidence, and/or resources
- Help you get unstuck and facilitate mobility
- Increase clarity and confidence in making decisions
- Deepen leadership abilities
- Improve communication to inspire and motivate your teams
- Achieve work/life balance to reduce anxiety and stress
I believe you are the expert in your life & in your business and won’t tell you or teach you how you should do things. Rather, through appreciative inquiry (asking you open ended questions that invoke you to look deep within yourself for the answers you already have but rarely access) I will support you in the process of realizing new possibilities, choices and approaches to consistently improve your results.
My skill set and experience make me different from other coaches. Since I have 30+ years as an entrepreneur and successful business owner, have started 6 businesses, combined with a background in professional and competitive public speaking, over 20 years as a sales trainer, a graduate of Toastmasters International, Dale Carnegie, and Sandler Sales Training, as well as being a World Champion Gold Medalist in Martial Arts…I have a rather unique set of skills and competitive nature that can help you achieve any goal you set.
I look forward to working with you to achieve your goals,
~ Matt Randall
The Matt Randall Companies 