Elevate your key thinking skills ……. Perform better in your job …….. Create a clearer path for your future success……
In today’s challenging world, achieving career success and a fulfilling life is not easy. But using a friendly and supportive coach, who can provide practical guidance, support and perspective, can work wonders.
We help ambitious and career-minded people – from career starters to experienced managers – to achieve the results, satisfaction and personal growth they want from their work lives.
1:1 mentoring and coaching. Based on actual, real-world management experience!
We specialise in coaching for vital thinking skills, vital ‘soft’ personal skills/behaviours and mentoring support for life/career planning. Our senior partner, Mike Owen, is able to apply his 25+ years’ broad executive and organisational experience as well as two management degrees and two decades of in-house and external coaching and mentoring.
Coaching for vital thinking skills
Every idea, intention or action first starts with thought. But, sadly, most managers are not trained in how to think well. Instead, often managers would typically rather get on with doing things or simply trust to their gut feeling, experience or the majority view of others. We want to help change that! We offer coaching around the following aspects of thinking:
- What effective thinking means
- Dealing with cognitive biases & distortions
- Analytical/systems thinking and critical thinking
- Listening, empathy & perspective-taking
- Foresight, visioning, imagination & creative thinking
- Strategic thinking – seeing the big issues and opportunities to frame big choices
- Judgment & decision-making
- Other thinking modes e.g. self-reflecting, agile thinking, ethical thinking
Coaching for other vital professional skills & behaviours
Doing well in any role today also needs a range of core ‘soft” personal skills and qualities. We provide coaching in the following areas, in particular:
- Mindset: e.g: a learning/growth mindset, positive outlook, open-minded, curiosity
- Self-management: e.g: self-awareness, control over thoughts/emotions, focus
- Relational skills: e.g: emotional intelligence, listening, empathy, collaboration, .
- Team leadership: e.g: team-structuring, goal-setting, motivation, coaching
- Communication: e.g: influencing, persuading,
- Confidence & adaptability: e.g: drive, will-power, resilience, learning, change-handling
General mentoring support for specific job challenges and situations
We offer tailored coaching and mentoring to help you handle particular professional or leadership challenges with greater skill and confidence. From simple to more complex situations. A few examples:
- Preparing a big presentation for a Board meeting
- How to translate a set of strategic goals into a strong action plan for a team
- How to re-energise a team suffering from poor morale
- How to manage stress or become more resilient in handling your job
- How to manage ‘upwards’ and impress your boss
Support to plan and develop your life and career
Are you looking for more clarity, meaning or sense of purpose in your life? Do you perhaps feel stuck or unfulfilled in your current job or career? Could you use some support in thinking about or preparing for your next goal or move? These are just the types of issues we can assist with.
The foundation of our support is helping you to gain excellent ‘self-insight’. This is about really knowing yourself and what you want in your life and career. Key aspects include knowing your personality, strengths/weaknesses, key values/beliefs, main likes/dislikes, and key aspirations..
Then we work closely with you to help you think about and clarify your feelings and future aims; explore options and strategies; counter any fears or doubts; identify suitable new opportunities; and really boost your confidence, positivity and resilience for the future. We can also provide support with practical things like CV enhancement and preparing for interviews.
Our coaching approach and values
The overall aim with our coaching and mentoring is to help our clients elevate their levels of confidence, skill, effectiveness and fulfilment in what they do.
For all areas of our support, we’ll design and propose a tailored coaching/mentoring programme, with a set of clearly agreed set of goals/outcomes and progress measures from the start. A programme typically comprises a series of 60-90 minute sessions, either online or in-person, running over a number of weeks. But, of course, if only one or two dedicated sessions are needed, that’ll do!
We use a flexible range of approaches and techniques to suit your preferences and aims, but often including, for example, discussion, self-reflection, mental models, solution exploration, guided practice and feedback. At the end of a programme, we’ll always work with you to help you plan how best to embed and carry on improving your new skills e.g. a timed plan with further progress targets and selection of supportive routines and habits.
FREE, initial ‘discovery’ consultation
What specific development goals or performance issues are on your mind ?
As a first step, we suggest a no-cost, totally confidential 1:1 chat with Mike. Either online or by phone. Tell him what’s on your mind and discover some ideas/proposals about how he could assist.
Phone us on 01994 278118 or fill in the Contact page on this website.