Your New Secret Sauce: Guided-Self Coaching

Learn how to ‘get out of your own way’ and become your very own go-to person!

Doing your best in any role in today’s uncertain and complex working environment can be intimidating. Guided self-coaching is a quick and effective way of moving forward to embrace your opportunities by overcoming personal challenges and maximizing your professional potential.

Guided self-coaching involves using your life experience to help you find out things about yourself on your own, through techniques of self-awareness and reflection. It helps you identify and overcome the issues that may be influencing your effectiveness at work, and clears the way to success through increased confidence, self-esteem, creativity and problem- solving skills.

What is guided self-coaching?

Guided Self-coaching is the curated process of guiding a person’s growth and development, including through periods of transition, in both the professional and personal realms. And in my work as an Executive Coach I focus my clients’ self-coaching education and practice to identify and address issues related to professional fulfillment and effectiveness.

Guided self-coaching involves seeing ourselves as a work-in-progress, being open to learning and change, and adopting a mindset that supports this perspective. This attitude toward ourselves is the foundation for all self-coaching.

Self-Awareness

An important product of this reflection is increased self-awareness, which heightens in-the-moment perception of how we respond to various situations and a deeper understanding overtime of our habitual tendencies.

We can then capitalize on these patterns, leveraging those that work to our advantage and learning how to better at challenging those that work to our disadvantage.

Change

At some level self-coaching is about change. Changing how we spend our time to increase fulfillment and changing our behaviour, so we are more effective. Doing more of what is working in our lives and doing less of – or stopping entirely – what’s not working.

Guided self-coaching can be an advantage in a number of circumstances-supervisors and managers who exhibit consistent and predictable behaviour are generally viewed as more effective.

Action and Inaction

Change is rarely easy, but the self-awareness gained through guided self-coaching can make the process much easier. Heightened self-awareness allows us to make different choices, both in the moment and overtime. In the moment, we can act–or we can refrain from action. In situations where we might tend to lean back, to avoid a conflict, or to shrug off work that seems difficult, rather than be limited by our pre-existing mental models and beliefs about ourselves, we can step forward and act.

You can develop and apply your own strategic process of self-management through guided self-coaching.

Goals

Guided self-coaching efforts are driven by goals. Your goal(s) may be highly detailed, a target we want to hit or an accomplishment to achieve, or merely be a general direction we want to move toward. While clarity about goals may be essential if we want to achieve them, also gauging whether our goals are the right goals at all is paramount.

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Diana Kawarsky is a Certified Coaching Professional and has coached thousands of clients since 2000. Her current Executive Coaching practice focuses on senior leaders and equipping early career clients to practice self- coaching. She is a senior member of the Schulich ExecEd faculty and receives feedback that places her among our very best. She brings 20+ years of successful experience as a facilitator, adult educator and management consultant to her coaching practice.

Diana is your on-line Coach in the new Schulich ExecEd e+ online course: Guided Self-Coaching for New Supervisors & Managers.

Currently, this program is offered as a self-paced, fully online program and you are able to register and start at anytime.