What is Solution Focused Coaching?
Pioneered and developed by Marilyn Atkinson, PhD, Solution-Focused Coaching is an advanced coaching model that integrates the profession of coaching with a highly developed body of personal growth technologies. Developed over the past 30 years, it provides a comprehensive approach that assists individuals, managers and teams to take action in alignment with their highest individual and corporate vision.
Why Solution Focused Coaching?
How can we define Solution Focused Coaching? As an effective Solution Focused personal or business coach, you will do what a good sports coach, an acting trainer, or a writing teacher does, but with systemic clarity of focus. As great coach, you will challenge your client. You will clarify what the client wants, and takes the time to find out what winning in life means to them. As a coach, you are a partner in first clarifying your client’s vision and the steps to get there, and then inspiring his or her steps into your next level of personal excellence.
Through coaching your client can discover the life he or she knows as his or her deepest aim; a life of development and accomplishment, both personally and professionally.
“A coach is someone to hold you accountable for your life, to make sure you really do live up to your potential,” says Thomas Leonard, a key developer in the growing profession.
As a coach, you encourage and sponsor your clients towards the ownership of skill-sets that encourage and support him or her to increase creativity, productiveness and effectiveness. As a coach, you will inspire the client to move towards whatever makes the biggest difference to accelerate his or her development choices at this stage career and life.
With Solution focused methods that include Erickson language patterns, Whiteboard Coaching, NLP tools and Four-Quadrant thinking, you learn the advanced skill-sets that move you into the skills of excellence as a coach. No matter where you are in life, there is always a desire for professional flexibility and creativity; for closer relationships or for a deeper, richer feeling or meaning to life. Solution Focused coaching technologies advance people towards the clear apprehension of their own unique path.
People with high aspirations, move past these ‘gremlins’ through simply partnering with a coach. Athletes, high achievers, musicians, writers, skilled actors know they get best results with a coach who can help them review aims, set directions, clarify and specify steps. Their attention can then become relaxed around their ultimate direction towards excellence. When they commit themselves to work with a personal coach they learn how to focus on their long-range ability sets. A serious performer or serious player in the realm of competitive sports or music would not expect to progress very far without a strong alliance with a good coach.
How Does Solution Focused Coaching Provide Benefits?
The Solution Focused approach provides a very elegant pathway towards choice and change. If coaching is a supreme profession, solution focused coaching using NLP, “Whiteboard Thinking™” and four-quadrant methodologies allows for the best skill-set we know currently available on the planet to amplify coaching results.
What are some ways that an integral approach combining Ericksonian, NLP and Solution Focused methods can assist people to attain a high level of professionalism as a coach?
Eleven benefits to using Solution Focused coaching techniques:
Creating Powerful Futures:
Ericksonian, Solution Focused approaches and NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) offer precise methodologies for reviewing and rehearsing futures scenarios. They provide easy methods for strategizing and comparing the innovative approaches needed to get specific results. Most of all, they assist people to supercharge their focus to the specifics of their life vision.
Values Exploration:
The ‘inner game of coaching’ develops high-level skill with values affirmation, exploration, and personal development. This provides a wonderful convergence with the main thrust of advanced coach training to align and maintain focus on values, and valued priorities. Coach training, with an NLP base, gives coaches a fine set of tools for precise value development with their clients.
Creativity Tools:
Creativity tools make a huge difference to a coach’s capacity to really inspire the people that he or she is working with. Creative inspiration comes from the heart, and linking our heartfelt dreams to strategic thinking allows us to enhance and clarify our creative focus.
Strategy Streamlining Tools:
People often need a coach to assist them to explore and distinguish alternative pathways available for streamlined results. A coach can empower their clients to stay on target when things get complex, as well as to assist them to judge and monitor the key parameters of a complex project through the unfolding stages. Our training provides powerful project formulation frameworks.
Ericksonian Metaphor Development:
Clear metaphors accelerate personal effectiveness and clarity of movement. We can use advanced Ericksonian methodologies to assist our clients to make their own personal metaphors compelling for themselves.
Strongly Anchored Resources:
Resource Development assists coaches to get their clients into relaxed and creative states. Visual anchoring technologies have been designed for effective telephone coaching.
Effective Use of Telephone:
Working on the phone requires markedly different listening skills from face-to-face interactions. With masterful skills, you can learn to understand the multiple ways people pay attention and change attention. You learn to recognize sensory patterns so you can successfully respond with an easy flow of resourceful, respectful awareness to the sensory systems the client habitually uses. Coaches also get value when they learn advanced, ‘Whiteboard Coaching’ telephone methods such as those taught through Erickson College programs.
Ritual Space Approaches to Learning and Design:
‘Thinking spaces’ have assisted the creative, developmental thrust of integrative coaching approaches over the last 20 years. Erickson College has pioneered the new technologies of Whiteboard Coaching, including special for elegant designing, planning, and implementation procedures. Using these as telephone coaching tools, you can quickly translate many of the easiest, most useful conceptual and design frameworks into your day-to-day coaching repertoire.
Solution Focused Shortcuts:
Working effectively in thirty to forty minute sessions requires strong capacities to move quickly into new territory. Solution focused, brief, questioning strategies offer coaches the easiest possible methodologies for quick, effective, empowerment of clients.
How Strong Is The Demand For Coaching?
In the 21st Century, the opportunity for professional coaches could not be higher. During the nineties the coaching profession became visible and with the national media exposure during the last five years of the nineties, the demand for coaching and coach training quickly tripled. Now, in the 21st century, for almost every country of the world, you will find coaching is becoming a profession of choice; incorporating and expanding leadership functions in corporations, in organizations, and in personal life.
Why The Art & Science Of Coaching Program?
Erickson College is an international school with connections in multiple countries. We are participants in connected into the international conversation about the key skills needed in the world today. For this reason, our courses offer a team building, creativity and have an accelerated learning emphasis. In this course you will be trained in the kind of leadership skills that develop you to respond to the current needs today. North America needs strong, solution focused coaches to develop and facilitate outcome thinking.
Change produces stress. Our coaches learn to assist people to stay relaxed and productive in times of challenge. Our coaches are trained in stress-reduction technologies. This also means our courses produce fun, relaxation and deep enjoyment for our students. We offer a practical and experiential approach that our students love. We train effective coaches!
Corporations and organizations everywhere need multi-faceted coaches and facilitators who have the kind of flexibility and calibration skills that our students learn.
Erickson College is over 20 years old now. We have been teaching and expanding business coaching and personal coaching internationally with systemic NLP skills for 20 years, with over 15,000 graduates worldwide. Coaching, as a publicly recognized approach, is only fifteen years old! We have been integrating Solution Focused Coaching with powerful NLP technologies for over ten years.
We focus on training individuals on multiple levels and offer them the flexibility of integrated choices. We train counselors to be coaches, and coaches to be an excellent solution-focused coach… which is the essence of good counseling! We train managers and leaders in understanding coaching as a flexible tool for a relaxed and resourceful workplace.
We focus on excellence! Psychology Today has called the solution focused skill base “the heart of the new performance-based approaches”. We have been developing the field of expert performance modeling for over twenty years.
Our base and our integrity, is the recognition of the deeply spiritual nature of the solution focused coaching conversation. Our emphasis is on inner skills of flexibility, choice and personal excellence.
We assist individuals to fire their own passion towards excellence. We work with the widest vision and strongest aim to develop high-level coaches.