• Certified to Coach: SKA Qualifications
• The CEO as Coach
• The Business Leader
• Personal Coaching
• Crafting A Coaching Culture

The coaching process can look simple on the outside, yet it is sophisticated and highly structured on the inside.

Certified to Coach: SKA Qualifications

At SKA, we were coaching before there was such a field. In the late 1980s we began working with CEOs in contracts over extended periods of time to improve their business performance, their performance as leaders and the overall quality of their lives.

As the field grew we enhanced our skills. At SKA we have a team of fully certified coaches throughout the United States. Many have been certified by the Hudson Institute or other schools certified by the ICF. Most have had years of coaching experience and hold degrees in organizational development or have done other human development work inside organizations. Our coaches have their own styles and are not clones, bound to any one method. They have been chosen for their skills and wisdom and humanity, a deep set of values to help others grow, to assist organizations in reaching their potential, as demonstrated by the work they have done throughout their lives ~ not by the most recent certificate they may have received, no matter how relevant.

Coaching is conversation-based personalized learning. Professional coaches evoke clients' passions to create and sustain their futures. Coaching facilitates a pathway for participants to reach their goals by gaining a deep understanding of their strengths and development needs. Coaching helps clients quantify and qualify their professional and life targets and gives them an accountable process for living their goals, achieving milestones and continuing their learning. Good coaching creates new ideas for addressing problems, enhances creativity, inspires the mind and encourages the heart. You have the wrong coach if this kind of outcome is not felt regularly.

There is a science behind coaching and we know it well, because we have put into practice the science of emotional intelligence, listening, and creative dialogue to help tap greater potential in team leaders for years. But there is a mystery in coaching that makes it an art form as well. The magic of the moment, the breakthroughs that come with coaching are not predictable, nor should they be. Coaching is a boost to support people as they live the unknowns in the adventure of the work and their lives.

The benefits of working with SKA Coaches are to:

• reach your professional goals
• assess your skills and your behaviors
• receive feedback on your choices, thinking and performance
• create a plan to achieve your vision
• establish milestones for assessing progress
• understand the balance of professional and personal life
• network, learn, adopt new thinking and ways of performing

In great coaching, all the work is actionable because it is totally customized to the client. Coaching has become an important part of the development field, in large measure because it is so effective and efficient. It is totally focused on stated needs so the client has none of the extraneous elements of a classroom, where, if you are lucky, 50% of the material may be actionable.

The CEO as Coach

With change as the dominant force in our enterprises and communities, leadership that enables positive response to discontinuity is in constant and growing demand. Coaching is one of the key methods that enables CEOs to develop their teams and ready them for the changes they need to lead. But there are many myths about coaching and a few key principles to keep in mind.

John Schuster teaches CEOs how to use coaching to guide their teams to use their strengths and avoid their weaknesses to further the business. Coaching is more about tapping imagination than it is dispensing good ideas; once that difference is learned, real progress can happen. But coaching methods must be tailored to the coach, the client, the situation. And the principles, while universal, need to be used artfully to have full effect.

Coaching for CEOs helps the CEO and team

• reach their own professional and personal goals
• get more work done well by staying on target and keeping motivation high
• add coaching skills to mentoring and other leadership roles
• provide feedback in a compelling manner
• establish milestones for assessing progress for their teams
• understand the balance of professional and personal life
• adopt new thinking and ways of performing as a leader

The Business Leader

Coaching at one time was seen as something only people in trouble needed. Now the rate of change and the sheer number and complexity of changes that business leaders face has created a need for a coach as a trusted advisor and confidante who can assist the leader at keeping her performance at the very top of her game. Change requires new thinking and altered practices. Time with a coach is often the best way to protect such time for innovation and to challenge the models that need to be changed in order for the business to move head.

Patricia Kane is a Hudson Institute-certified coach with a focus on helping clients explore and create the next chapter of their lives. One of Patricia's specialties is helping business executives and professionals perform at a higher level by forming the mental habits, communication discipline, and organizational skills their roles demand of them. She uses a depth and breadth of knowledge, tools and processes to help clients move from where they are into the role they've been reaching for. Patricia spends time getting to know the core issues and learning style of the client before guiding the client in a variety of learning activities and practices designed to take the individual's current knowledge, experience and desires to the next best years of their lives.

Personal Coaching

The problem with creating a great personal life is not that there are not enough choices or resources. To design the life you want, there are plenty, maybe too many, ideas and resources and options. The deeper challenge is to create a thinking and decision-making process that is rich and varied enough to design a life that synergizes all the roles at home, at work and in the community. Our given models for life design are carryovers from an earlier generation that do not fully accommodate what today's life requires.

What are some of these carryovers that get in our way?

• We do our learning in late adolescence and early adulthood and then live our lives. Wrong....we learn and remake ourselves continually in adulthood. Your life plan has to include what and how you will learn for what you want to make happen next!
• We will experience stability in our careers only if we choose the right industry or company with the correct growth projections. Wrong....even the high-growth professions will experience rapid shifts and be less stable than what our parents knew.
• Be primarily practical since the world only rewards those who are willing to fit into the categories the world has put in place. Wrong....a world of change awaits those who put their dreams into practice and who create new spaces between the old categories. There will always be actuaries and sales professionals, but we will do all the work with more imagination and attention to the people who are behind the profession. Entrepreneuring your life means you can live where you want, how you want, and according to the values and principles that most resonate for you and the world you want to serve.

Life planning is not an exercise in coping for those feeling overwhelmed; it is an exercise in imagination for those who want to dream their dreams and live life by their own principles, a mixture of those they inherited and those they have adopted.