Personal Development Coaching, Online and in Milton Keynes

The Five Circles

This is what I draw for people, because it gives you somewhere to stand. Five concentric rings, and you are in one of them right now.

Rustout is the innermost. Stuck, stagnating, not moving forward, and no clear idea what to do about it. Anything that stops moving goes stale, and that includes people. You are not learning, you are not growing, physically, emotionally or intellectually, and the longer it runs the more it costs.

Reflection is the ring out from that. Stepping back and asking what is actually going on here. Why am I stuck, and am I sticking myself? A lot of us are living in prisons we built and then forgot we built. This does not have to involve a therapist or a coach, and I would rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise.

Growth is next, and it is not more thinking. It is doing something differently, which is always the hard bit.

Contentment is where you feel good about where you are, and you like yourself a bit more again. Worth having, and it comes with a risk: it slides back into rustout, quietly, because comfortable is very close to stuck.

And burnout is the outer ring. Too much at once, or too much handed to you, and your head feels like it is going to come off. What happens then is the same thing that happens in rustout. You stagnate, you hide, you shut down. A short spell is survivable. Longer than that and it starts showing up in your health.

The sweet spot is not contentment. It is looping reflection, growth and contentment round over time. Reviewing, changing something, then settling in and enjoying it for a while before you do it again.

The Growth Curve, and Why People Snap Back

Here is the part that decides whether any of this works, and it is the reason coaching exists at all.

When you start doing something differently it feels awkward. Of course it does, it is different. So there is a dip, and in the dip you think: this is uncomfortable, this is not me, I do not normally do this. And most people snap straight back into the old way at exactly that point, because they never get through the curve to the bit where the benefit shows up.

The dip might be days. It might be weeks. It can be months. That is the stretch where you need someone leaning on you, and it is the whole job.

Something else happens in the dip that nobody warns you about. Some of the people around you will try to pull you back. Not deliberately, mostly, and not because they wish you badly. It is that your staying put is part of what makes their own situation feel reasonable, and when you start moving that stops being true. I see it constantly. It is worth knowing in advance, because otherwise you read it as evidence you were wrong.

Anyone Can Call Themselves a Life Coach

Including people who did a weekend course, and people who did nothing at all. Coaching is unregulated in this country. There is no register you have to be on, no training you have to hold, and nobody to complain to if it goes badly.

So it is fair to ask what you are getting.

I am a qualified life coach, and I am also a psychotherapist in practice since 2013. The second one matters more than the first, and here is why. A fair number of people who book coaching do not need coaching. What is presenting as being stuck is sometimes low mood, sometimes grief that has not been dealt with, sometimes something from a long way back that is still setting the rules. A coach without clinical training will happily build you an action plan on top of that, and it will not hold.

I will tell you if I think that is what is happening, and we would do something different instead. That is not me upselling you into therapy, it is the opposite. It is the thing you cannot get from someone who only has one tool.

Does Coaching Actually Work

Reasonably well, and less certainly than the industry suggests.

The main meta-analysis found significant positive effects across five outcome categories, from coping at the low end to goal-directed self-regulation at the high end, which is a polite way of saying coaching is best at the thing it is actually for: deciding what you want and then doing it.

Two honest qualifications. The authors open by saying research on coaching effectiveness lags well behind how popular coaching has become, and that is their assessment rather than mine. And the studies are of coaching inside organisations, so the evidence is about workplace coaching rather than about somebody helping you sort your life out. I am not going to hand you a number from a different setting and let you assume it covers this.

What Working With Me Is Like

No reception, no team, nobody else in the building. You send a message, I am the person who replies, and I am the person you sit down with.

We would start by working out which circle you are actually in, because rustout and burnout look similar from outside and need opposite things. Then what you want, which is usually harder to answer than people expect, and then something you are going to do differently before the next session.

I will not tell you how many sessions it takes. Anyone giving you a number before meeting you is guessing, and the honest answer is that it depends on what turns up once we start.

If what you want is specifically about work, a role you have grown into or a team, that sits under coaching for work and business.

In person in Wolverton, or online, wherever you are.