The Coaching Companion: Get the Most from Your Coaching Experience, 2nd Edition

The Coaching Companion is a short book written to new coaching clients. It is our hope to put this resource into the hands of every person who receives professional coaching - whether in the domain of leadership, career, health, or life. Use of this resource will elevate the quality of coaching for even the most masterful of coaches. Why? The impact of coaching is a result of not only the coach’s skill, but also the clients’ ability to fully the leverage the coaching they receive. Coaches’ skills are based on hundreds if not thousands of hours of training and experience. Clients, on the other hand, have few if any resources or experiences on which to build their capacity to be coached. Given that the coach’s success is, by definition, the client’s success, we believe that building client’s capacity to be coached is a critically important. Clients, consider this: You are investing your time and resources in coaching. You have made every effort to select the best coach, and you’re hoping that this coach can help you succeed in at least one big way. The Coaching Companion is filled with guidance on how to maximize your coaching experience. It will help you prepare for coaching conversations, communicate your goals and experiences clearly, translate insight into action, and ultimately maximize your return on investment. Coaches, consider this: Our clients are more than half the equation. How they show up and what they do throughout the coaching process determines their success…any by extension, ours. Rarely do we, as coaches, have the time we might like to prepare our clients to get the most from their coaching experience. And rarely are we sitting with our clients when they come across the situations they can learn from. The Coaching Companion helps our clients understand the importance of their role in the growth process so that they may approach their personal and professional development more thoughtfully and intentionally. It will allow you, their coach, to get more quickly into meaningful conversation. Integrating The Coaching Companion into your practice is simple. Gift this book to your clients at the beginning of each engagement. Consider which chapters you’d like them to read prior to your kickoff session, and where other chapters may support your style and approach to coaching along the way.