Personal Creativity Coach – Group Coaching – Teaching
Coaching is Not A Luxury
Why do everything alone, especially when following a largely unknown path? Creative people can use all the support they can get to turn ideas into the completed projects you have always wanted. Do you think you can do all the heavy lifting alone? Most of us can’t. With help, most of us can.
Is Your Creative Life Passing You By?
Yes, that can happen if you are not careful. Everything else and recovering from everything else can leave you blind and blocked to your Creative Life. Coaching can bring your Creative Life back to life through helping you find time, energy, support, and more to get you going and to keep your Creative Life growing. I use my The Creative’s Journey system to help guide us through your creative journey to a fuller Creative Life, getting you to where you want to go.
What is Coaching?
When you have a coach you have someone you can work with week-in-week out on your personal ambitions. A coach gives you a safe place to declare, explore, and implement those ambitions. A coach is a sounding board, objective observer, cheerleader, mild guide, doorway to other resources, another set of eyes, a source of structure and a source of freedom. You don’t have to remain stuck nor do you have to walk the challenging path of the Creative alone.
What the Heck is Coaching? Don’t take my word for it. Read the New York Times article that covers the history and pros/cons of coaching.
What Should I Expect?
What happens in coaching will vary by what you need and where you are. However, there are some foreseeable patterns for most people as they travel the path with a coach. Note: This is the typical progression of Creativity Coaching in my opinion, but you are not required to follow the order of topics below. Your coaching sessions will be customized to you and your interests.
Typical Early Stages of Coaching – “Help me get started. I know I can do this.”
Building The Tool Box
Early coaching sessions tend to focus on capturing, deepening, and expanding your vision of what you want to do. This work also includes focusing on why a vision is important, how to use that personal vision, when to turn to it for guidance and when to update it.
Further sessions after that generally include talk on: how to break your big vision or big project into manageable chunks, how to find time and energy to do this work, and how to overcome blocks to getting started.
Leaping Over Obstacles
Each of us have an array of obstacles—blocks, fears, inner critics, a desire to do too much, frustration with our speed of progress, problems from our creative past. We must learn to leap over these obstacles to move forward. Special techniques of self-observation, guided imagery, and inner dialogue are brought to this part of the creative journey.
Typical Middle Stages of Coaching – “Keep me going. I’ve waited a long time to do this so help me finish it.”
Keeping on the Path: Building Strengths
Persistance, warrior-like focus, dedication, courage, flow, and other strengths are discovered at this stage of the Creative/Creativity Coach experience. These strengths are stoked and anchored to make them available for creative practice, creative idea generation, and creative production. These strengths are so important at this stage because the middle portion of the creative path is filled with all sorts of distractions and dips that can pull apart and abolish the Creative’s forward movement. Just as the Creative is making deep and broad progress towards a long wanted achievement, these new challenges arise. Coaching gives the extra margin of support and training in the essential skills the Creative needs at this point.
Typical Later Stages of Coaching – “Thank goodness I got my first project done. Help me decide where I need to go next.”
Switching Gears to Mastering Self-Coaching
The goal of coaching is not only to help you achieve your ambitions but also to teach you how to coach yourself. As we progress with coaching, the secrets of coaching will be highlighted so you can take the techniques with you. If you wish, the process can be further illustrated with supplemental material from the world of coaching. Ultimately, you have to self-coach if you want to keep moving towards your goals.
Jump-Start Brief Coaching
People leave coaching. Yes, there is life after coaching. With that said, once you have experienced the power of a coaching relationship you know how important it is to occasionally return to coaching for a jump-start. Blocks come up, new opportunities arise, we forget how to help ourselves and more can happen. Come back for a single session or sign up for a longer brief coaching arrangement to get your mojo back.
How Long Does Coaching Take?
It depends on how much support you want and how much you really want to get a feel for coaching over the course of working on a project or projects. If you have had a lot experience with coaching or just want a quick surgical support period, then a month or two might do it. If you really want to get to know yourself as a Creative, to sharpen your approach to your creative work, stretch yourself to take on projects you have never faced before, and work broadly to share your creations with the world, think about working with a coach for 3, 6, or 12 months. If you want to work longer, that’s great, no one will be kicked out the door. You are in control of the coaching experience in terms of length of time and your goals.
Safe and Confidential
The coaching experience provides you a safe place to stretch your wings, freely express your ambitions, think big/be big, and explore thinking in new ways. It is also a great place to look directly at the old standards obstacles that crush achievement—fear of failure, anxiety, frustration, and the inner critic. Coaching is a confidential place. I follow the ethics of the world’s largest coaching association, the International Coach Federation which means our entire time together will be treated as confidential.
O.k., How Do I Get Started?
The vast majority of coaching in the world today is done over the phone, e-mail, or Skype. Most of my sessions are done by phone/Skype with e-mail follow-ups. The frequency of sessions can run from once a week to once a month, depending on where you are and what your needs are. For beginning coaching clients, I recommend weekly sessions to get you into the rhythm of coaching. Sessions are a productive 45 minutes with the client plugging away between sessions working on their projects and on optional homework assignments to help them build their Creative abilities.
Coaching Fees:
The vast majority of coaches require contracts and up-front payment of multiple sessions. I do not. Pay as you go. I charge $75 per session. Pay by credit card online. That’s it. Simple. Ready to get started?
Let’s meet by phone for a free, introductory, 15 minute session. We can discuss what you want to do, which program might work best for your needs, and learn about how we might be a fit. No pressure selling, just conversation about where you want your creative life to go. E-mail me, Gary Goodwin, directly using the form below:
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Group Coaching & Teaching
Feel free to contact me if you wish to start coaching for your group or for me to provide teaching at your organization on what keeps Creatives stuck and how to get help. This coaching can be done in person or via phone seminar. Contact me using the form above.
For those living in the Washington, D.C. area, join The Stuck Creative Meetup group.
