The process of coaching

Empowerment

Once you have gained a greater awareness of who you are and of your potential, George will then act as a catalyst and support for you as you develop that potential into reality. Using tools, techniques and insights to galvanise you into action along the way.

His aim is to act as a sounding board to help you access your own ideas and arrive at your own conclusions, rather than to impose his own. In this way you strengthen yourself, so you can make changes and move forwards. In George’s words, “I’m like the squash wall that people hit the ball against – the person then learns to play squash themselves”.

Why coaching with George works:

Coaching:

Meeting on a regular basis – lies at the heart of coaching. Coaching works because you’re connecting frequently. George coaches the majority of his clients a few times a month, by telephone or face to face. This regular connection ensures you maintain focus on your goals, generates more commitment and also provides a supportive framework for whatever you are working on. Perhaps, most importantly, it helps to build a totally trusting relationship.
A collaborative partnership - The strength of coaching is that you set the agenda. You tell the coach what you want to achieve and together you come up with solutions and strategies to help get you there. You have a partner who is always by your side, who sees your strengths, who you can share your dreams and ideas with, who knows when to push, when to pull and when to listen.
It’s about moving forwards – Although in many ways a good coach is a psychotherapist, while psychotherapy focuses on the past, a coach will deal primarily with the present and the future. And helping fully functional people move forwards onto the next level of their life. Life coaching is not a replacement for psychotherapy or counselling, and does not deal with clinical issues, mental illness or deep emotional issues that require specialist advice. George cannot treat cases like this except to refer them to the right specialist.
There’s a personal focus - Coaching works because the focus is on you, not just the goal and the business. This unique intimacy marks it out from services like management consultancy. Focusing purely on goals can be one dimensional thus limiting opportunities for you to grow and develop, which in the long term are key to sustainable success and fulfilment.

Beyond Coaching:

Mentoring – In his coaching capacity George is reluctant to give advice too quickly. Coaches are trained as ‘non-experts’, their aim being to empower people to find their own wisdom, make their own choices and then make the necessary changes. It means George helps everyone from dentists to IT people - despite knowing little about root canal work or RAM. However, his extensive experience in different industries, in management, marketing and PR together with his networking expertise means clients often call on him for business advice in a mentoring capacity. He has been a mentor to the Prince’s Trust for many years.
Connecting and networking – A unique aspect to George’s work is that he is a very well known expert in networking, giving lectures on the subject as well as being a past president of The Business Referral Exchange ( www.brxnet.co.uk ). He has a huge personal database of over 3,000 names in the UK and across the world and is always ready to help link clients to other people or businesses. In the last few years he networked over £3,000,000 worth of business to other people.
Trusted associates – Sometimes clients need extra help in addition to or instead of coaching, or expertise to help them with the changes they decide to make. George has a substantial list of trusted associates that he can recommend:
- psychiatrists
- psychotherapists
- management consultants
- career advisers
- hypnotherapists
- image / personal branding experts
- astrologers
- fitness gurus
- other specialists on personal and professional development

Two banned words

…are ‘should’ and ‘must’. Coaching empowers you to arrive at your own choices – decisions which may seem incomprehensible to anyone else.

The invisible man

A coach should be invisible and become ‘as nothing’, sinking their own ego behind the conversation and listening with intuition and full attention. As George explains “When I coach I’m not ‘me’, I wish to be so completely within the soul of the client that they take something out of it”.