Coaching Services

Identifying and Reaching Your Goals

Coaching works to support you in identifying and reaching your goals. These goals can focus in virtually any area of your life. At the Bailey Leadership Initiative, we have worked with leaders in the organization support them in implementing a new strategic or fundraising plan, as well as working with individuals as they address their personal goals. We use the coaching model that is predicated on the belief that you have the resources and creativity to address the issues and challenges you are facing. We help you identify those resources, support you in seeing current and potential barriers, and help maintain your accountability.

Coaching sessions may occur in person or on the phone. Reminders and opportunities to check-in with your coach may even occur via e-mail. Coaching may be long-term or short-term. The length of the coaching relationship depends upon the project or goals that you are working on. You set the agenda and timeline for coaching.

Who uses Coaching?

People often seek out a coach at points of transition in their lives—sometimes even before the transition itself is obvious. Coaching can help provide fresh perspectives, sharpen your insights, and provide someone to serve as a sounding board. Coaching can also provide accountability for you as you work toward your goals.

Coaching is particularly useful in transitions into leadership positions in organizations and communities in which you might not have peers with whom you can discuss your situation and goals. Leadership positions, by their nature, are positions with high expectations and high visibility. We ‘grow’ into these and sometimes it’s useful to have a coach who can support and help accelerate this growth.

How Does Coaching Differ from Therapy?

Both coaching and therapy deal with creating change. Where therapy often works to address past hurts and emotions that are causing hurt and dysfunction, coaching is concerned with achieving results in the present and future, and starts from a place of healthy functioning. While past problems may emerge in a coaching session, coaching focuses on your strengths and helps you develop techniques to address the barriers to reaching your goals for a more fulfilling life.

What Can I Expect from a Coaching Session?

You set the agenda for the coaching sessions, so the phone or in-person conversation will begin with a brief discussion about how you want to use your coaching session that day. Your coach will help you stay on focus, as well as link the discussion to your broader goals and challenges. The session may include follow-up discussion from exercises or items that you agreed to work on from the previous session. Once again, the work with your coach is future oriented, rather than addressing past issues, so the session will have a forward-looking perspective, rather than serving as a review of past challenges.

Combining Coaching with Consulting Work

At the Bailey Leadership Initiative, we also work with organizational leaders on leadership development, implementation of organizational plans, and as follow-up to areas that have been addressed through a consulting arrangement with the organization.

Supporting an executive director or the board president or executive committee as they work to implement the plans, policies, or procedures that the Bailey Leadership Initiative has helped them develop increases the likelihood of organizational success. Coaching can be used as a follow-up support approach as an organization works to develop its capacity.