FAQ

The term coach has its origins in the English language and started to become popular in the middle ages with carriages. A carriage had a coachman. And what did the coachman do? The coachman picked up passengers at point A and took them to point B, their destination. 

I like this metaphor because this is what I'm doing, guiding my clients from point A to B. Point A is where they are right now, the situation, the difficulties that they are experiencing in their life, the problems that they have, the decisions that they want to take, but they don't know which decision is the best one. And then I take them to point B, which is their destination, the objective that they have for their coaching. So that's pretty much comparable. 

And similarly, when I think about a passenger in a coach, they obviously need to tell the coachman where they want to go, right? And then it's up to the coachman to find the way. And that's also what my contribution is, to find the way, the right process to take people to where they want to be.

The coaching process typically starts with the first contact with a client. What I do there is offer a free half an hour video call. People can also book directly from my LinkedIn profile or my website. 

It's without any engagement. We talk openly about the situation. With this intake it should become clear for both of us if we want to work together. If I feel I'm the right coach regarding this problem for this person, if this person has the feeling that, well, I think Chris can actually help me with this. And then we would have a first session. My sessions are typically between an hour to an hour and a half, because I really want to take the time. 

Then what we typically do in the first session, which we call  intake, is to get a better understanding of the situation. What is actually the question, the problem to be solved? What does my client want to achieve? It's also important to define together the objective, what are the criteria, what are the success measures? So how will we see in a few months from now that you have achieved your objective? 

Imagine the objective is I want to become more assertive. Well, we would look at: How will it look like when you're more assertive? What will you be able to see or to experience? How will you feel? What will the others say? What will the others be able to observe?

Once this is defined - and maybe sometimes it can take two coaching sessions, but that's okay - we would then start the coaching journey. I typically work with sessions every other week. I also like to work with homework, if that's okay for the client, to start some reflections between the sessions to really keep the process going.

It's always difficult to predict how long this process will take. As an average, I would say it's typically six to eight sessions over maybe three, four, or five months. That should be sufficient for most of the objectives that people bring to me. 

Should clients prepare themselves in any way before they come to me? Like ask themselves questions? You know what? Actually, they don't have to. They can just come without any preparation. I will make sure to ask the right questions so we really understand very well what the situation is and where the client wants to go. So yeah, absolutely. You could book this first half an hour call and just come very openly and we'll talk about it and see if it makes sense for us to work together.

What qualifications does a coach need to have? Do they need to be certified by anyone, or can they just call themselves a coach? Well, yeah, as you said, everybody can call themselves a coach these days. It's because the term coach is not regulated in the same way than a doctor would be or a notary, a lawyer, also psychologists go through a certain study, obtain a diploma, a certification, being licensed. It's not the case for coaches. So the coaching profession is not regulated by authorities.

But, I'll say but, the coaching community has organized itself in a way that there are organizations, professional organizations, like the ICF that I want to highlight, International Coaching Federation, where I'm a member, and it's that federation that takes care of regulation, kind of a self-regulation, if you will, that defines already a code of ethics, which is very important because here we're dealing with people.

Set of competencies that a coach should have: The ICF accredits schools that train future coaches and hand out diplomas.The ICF also certifies with a certain level of competency and amount of coaching experience.

I can imagine it's always difficult for people to find the right coach because it's difficult to see the forest for the trees, because there's so many. And probably even outside the ICF, there are certainly great coaches. If you want to have a direction, then I would say look for people who have certifications from the ICF. Then you know that those people adhere to a certain standard and a certain quality of profession.

What's the difference between a coach and a psychologist? Do they handle matters differently? Absolutely. I think this is a very important question. And even though it's not always black and white, because there are certainly psychologists who also work like a coach would do, there are some things that really distinguish them.

A psychologist, for instance, treats clients that they would probably even consider patients. For instance, clients that have a mental disorder, psychological troubles that need to be treated with therapeutic techniques. So when it comes to therapy, which is really healing something that is probably more in the past, think of traumas, healing past traumas. That's really something that should belong to a psychologist, a trained clinical psychologist to deal with these questions. So when someone would come to me with this as a coach, and I would hope also for my other coach colleagues, that they would send them to a trained professional for those matters.

The orientation of the coach is more the future. So a coach would pick up a client where they are right now, look at what works, what doesn't. Maybe would look into the past just to get some information on what have they tried already, what worked and what didn't, to really see, okay, how can we get from where we are now to where you want to be? This is more a future orientation for coaches. This might be a bit simplified, but maybe it helps to distinguish between the two professions.