MY COACHING PHILOSOPHY
The main reason I have chosen to become a coach is to help people in their work environment through my own experience.
There are many ways to do so, but now, after 35 years of working in the corporate world I want to have a more direct positive impact on my coachee’s lives at work, as well as on their career and professional development. Without intermediaries. I feel the most content and fulfilled through the human aspect of coaching: my client’s reactions, smiles, nods and when I am told I have made a difference in their professional lives.
Working in the corporate world exposed me to various fantastic opportunities. I am grateful to have worked on multiple exciting and valuable projects, traveled, and met remarkable people along the way. During my career, I especially enjoyed mentoring people who were reporting to me and seeking my advice. Supporting them through their issues and looking for solutions to encourage their professional growth was particularly fulfilling. Some of these professional relationships have turned into friendships which I have kept over the years.
What drives and gives me fulfillment, is the feedback I get from my coachees, that the work we are doing together is useful to them. Seeing them consider a different perspective in a situation where they previously felt stuck, helping them regain their confidence or discover a capability within themselves they were unaware of is why I chose this career.
I function with an iterative approach to feedback and seek my client’s honest and constructive opinions on how to best support them, in order to work together and aid them in their development.
With 35 years of experience in the business world, I have also sometimes made some wrong decisions or professional mistakes, and sought to not only learn from my experiences, but pass on this -sometimes painfully- gained wisdom from my previous career assignments. I am careful not to fall into ‘rescuing’ them, but rather focus on helping them have a better awareness of the situation and build their own solutions. I am aware of the risks and careful about not over-projecting my own past problems onto my clients, even if transfer and counter-transfer phenomena, and emotions, are of course part of a successful process.
To do that, I want to work with clients who are genuine in their quest for progress and improvement and are willing to explore the situations once a relationship of trust has been established.
I shall avoid clients with poor ethical values.
Reciprocally, I shall not try to gain control over my clients. They shall always remain free: to think, to act or not act, to follow a different course of action from what I would have found the most appropriate, and even to stop the coaching process.
Additionally, I am happy to also coach clients who are coming to me privately rather than through a corporation and will not discriminate based on how much the client can pay. I wish to remain open to coaching all kinds of professionals at any level in their career development.
To ensure remaining on track on ethics, I shall work with supervision and commit to work with them in full transparency. Part of what the coach brings to the coachee is support in facing some situations, thoughts or decisions. Symmetrically, the supervisor offers the coach a space where they are not alone, and where an additional “external eye” can help them in certain delicate situations.
What I offer is a combination of an extensive career in the corporate world (big and small companies, around the globe, navigating though successes, difficulties, accomplishments, failures, personal development and team management...) and a strong training, theoretical and practical, to become an executive coach. I have experienced the corporate world firsthand, and do not have only an abstract understanding of it. Understanding the contextual issues for people, their role, organization is crucial to my position as a coach. Furthermore, I am familiar with the cultural intricacies, having lived and worked in various very different countries, starting with France, the UK, Brazil and Japan.
I however want to remain “light”. Just as in music, the most talented musicians are the ones who are the most subtle and delicate at playing pianissimo, just as in literature the most moving texts are not the ones loaded with difficult words, adjectives and adverbs, I want my practice to show its “beauty” through lightness. A delicate touch, just at the right moment, just in the right way, for the enlightenment to appear.
I want to try to make people establish connections between things, see “what’s behind”, and look at the various elements of a situation with a certain distance. I will also encourage them to do so sometimes with humor. Being able to occasionally laugh about things, and oneself, is for me very important. It is also part of the “being light” philosophy.
What also attracts me in this profession is the opportunity to learn new things from an academic perspective. These learnings will be an important part of my personal development, but I also joined the EMCC (European Mentor and Coach Council) to meet and exchange with peers, and shall look for additional trainings and certifications which will complement my learnings.
To summarize, I shall bring all available resources, in me, but also by exploring the world, training, reading, making sense of my experience, for the success of my clients at work and in their personal life. Because satisfaction and happiness at work is a condition for happiness at home.
It will be a journey with a destination, but it will remain open, for me and my client, to what will be discovered on the way. Coachees will progress in total confidence, at their own speed, with a helping hand at their side, so that they can continue by themselves after the program is completed.
