"For me, coaching is all about helping people reach their true potential. It’s a shared journey towards what they want to achieve for themselves, their team or their organisation."
We provide two types of service – coaching and mentoring. They are related, but different.
Coaching can best be described as unlocking your potential to maximize your own performance. It is helping you to learn rather than teaching you. While a coach helps people to help themselves, a mentor is more direct. The mentor draws on their own experience to provide advice and counsel wherever needed, particularly with executive decision-making – a “sounding board” if you like.
Coaching usually takes place over the relatively short-term (months rather than years), each session is quite structured and meetings are typically arranged to a timetable. A mentoring relationship can last many years; while meetings may be more informal and arranged on an ad hoc basis.
There are a number of essential qualities common to both mentor and coach. Both need to have and to display empathy with their clients; both need to be good at listening, indeed they should practice “active listening” – listening attentively, retaining what is being said and avoiding the temptation to concentrate more on the follow-up question than they do on what they are being told. Finding out about the client and their needs through asking questions is common to both.
As a coach, I try to restrict themself to “open” questions” – that is, questions which encourage you to open up, to reveal more about yourself.
Examples of open questions would be, “Tell me about your relationship with your colleagues” or “Where do you see yourself going forward?” as opposed to “How difficult is it to get on with your colleagues” or “Do you think you will leave your job in the short-term or the medium-term?”
The mentor will feel able to bring forward some elements of their own knowledge and/or experience to illustrate a point or suggest a means to address an issue. For this reason, mentors are often more senior than their clients. The coach wants the client to take that step as much as possible, if not entirely, for themselves.
In all cases, sessions are individual and confidential. We can work with you here for two or three days at Le Bêtet, or set up online sessions of one or one and a half hours in duration.
I hold an MA in Economics and Philosophy from the University of St. Andrews and am a visiting Professor in Communications at the Brussels International College of Journalism. I have been accredited as a coach to the European Institutions for more than 15 years. I am a qualified Thomas PPA practitioner and an Affiliate of the CIPD.
To set up an initial chat, with no commitment, email me on [email protected]
