Coaching is a collaborative relationship focused on accelerating changes the client wants to achieve. The coach’s job is to provide a process that facilitates better thinking, decision-making, and results for the client.

Coaches help clients create new thinking, define clear goals, and sustain progress. Why is this difficult to do on one’s own? Because the brain is hardwired, our thoughts and behaviors tend to be automatic. Left to our own devices, we easily get stuck in old habits and ways of thinking. With the help of a coach, clients can find new, more efficient pathways to achieving their goals.

Coaches provide accountability to help clients achieve and sustain change. Accountability is a strong motivator. In coaching, it works like this:

1. When clients commit to take actions, they know they will need to report to their coach on progress.
2. This accountability increases clients’ awareness of the commitments they are making.
3. Knowing they are accountable to someone encourages them to do more.

Yes, client sessions are confidential and private. Confidentiality is just one of the ethical practices that coaches must respect. I observe the Code of Ethics published by the International Coaching Federation, of which I am a member.

My coaching practice is built on more than three decades of experience as a strategic and organizational consultant and corporate manager. In addition to holding an MBA from Harvard Business School, I completed an intensive coaching certification program at NYU’s School of Professional Studies, as well as an additional NYU course in leadership coaching. I have also completed two levels of certifications through the International Society for Emotional Intelligence, and I am qualified to administer the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT).

NYU’s coaching certification program draws on many streams of knowledge to prepare students to conduct evidence-based coaching:

1. Neuroscience
2. Positive psychology
3. Emotional intelligence
4. Adult learning
5. Systems and change theories
6. Coaching models: GROW (John Whitmore) and CREATE (David Rock)

Most of these disciplines were already familiar to me from my work and study in organizational psychology and behavior. The most profound new learning came from my introduction to recent advances in neuroscience. Understanding how the brain works is critical to an evidence-based coaching process.

Coaches don’t tell clients what to think. Instead, they teach them how to think. Coaching empowers clients to discover their own path to learning and change. The client owns the agenda, while the coach manages the process. This approach is based on evidence from neuroscience:

• The brain works by forming connections to build maps.
• To build new mental maps, individuals need to form new connections by thinking things through for themselves.
• Because each person’s brain is very different, we can never assume someone will think like us. That’s why giving advice doesn’t really work, while coaching is much more effective.

In scientific terms, coaching works because it activates the process of forming new connections in the brain:

• Coaches ask lots of questions to shift people out of automatic thinking and into the conscious brain, where new learning and change can be triggered.
• By thinking through issues, clients discover new insights that, in turn, generate the motivation to act.