Professional coach is your thinking partner and a mirror. Having a thinking partner can help you to make you aware of the different facets of who you are and better understand what is going on in and around you. If you just try hard to be something different without becoming aware of who you are, in the very next distress situation you will most probably relapse into your usual behaviour. Becoming aware of who you are may give you the key to the change you need. 

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What to expect:

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• Thought-provoking and creative, non-judgmental and respectful

• Considering the totality and interdependence of body, mind and environment

• Creating a deep awareness, challenge assumptions, being mindful

• With all of that, achieving a sustainable change

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What not to expect:

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• that ​I will make you happy

• that I will train you to be somebody else

• that I will push you to achieve a short-term goal

• that I will fix you

• that I will follow any kind of a hype

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I do not focus on one specific approach. Instead, I focus on the uniqueness of the client and their situation. Sometimes I apply my knowledge and experience of gestalt. It is a German word for the sum of parts that makes a whole and is an experiential, holistic and relational approach in psychology, psychotherapy, coaching, and organisational development. Like on the picture above, where you can see either a face or a figure under the Eiffel Tower, there is always a diversity of perceptions depending on our current focus, what we are mindful about in the given moment. Gestalt approach emphasises having an embodied presence and increasing awareness of what is being experienced in the moment. 

 

Coaching is extremely powerful in enhancing self-awareness and achieving a sustainable change. Development of self-awareness is one of the core principles of gestalt, and it enhances the ability to understand and being mindful about one's own effect on others. Following the definition of the Korn Ferry global competency framework, demonstrating self-awareness is a use of a combination of feedback and reflection to gain productive insight into personal "strengths" and "weaknesses". 

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Among these competencies, self-awareness is a blind spot in the organisations across the world. Organisations and individuals underestimate the importance of self-awareness, seeing it as a nice-to-have and a "soft" skill, whereas this "soft" skill directly influences organisational and individual success and impacts a higher return on investment of organisations. A study from the Korn Ferry Institute "A Better Return On Self-Awareness" shows that self-awareness correlates with corporate performance: companies with a higher rate of return also employ professionals who exhibit higher levels of self-awareness. 

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You can read more about applied gestalt in one of my articles.