Life Coaching and Mentoring
In addition to supporting students and organisations, Onyx Support also provide Life Coaching and Mentoring services,
to encourage and empower individuals to gain life-long skills to improve in all areas of life.
What is Life Coaching?
"A results life coach is someone who helps you identify your goals and develop an actionable plan to achieve them. Coaching may sound like a foreign concept to some, but to compete as a world-class athlete, you need the experience, enthusiastic support, objective perspective and insight of a coach. This is just as true for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business leaders, executives and business professionals. So, what is a life coach? A life coach is someone professionally trained to help you maximize your full potential and reach your desired results." - Tony Robbins
What does a Life Coach do?
A life coach definition can vary depending on what your specific goals are. A life coach encourages and counsels clients on a range of professional and personal issues. Life coaching is distinct from giving advice, consulting, counselling, mentoring and administering therapy. You would hire a coach to help you with specific professional projects, personal goals and transitions. A coach helps you grow by analysing your current situation, identifying limiting beliefs and other potential challenges and obstacles you face and devising a custom plan of action designed to help you achieve specific outcomes in your life.
The relationship between a client and their life coach is a creative partnership that seeks to:
· Identify, clarify and create a vision for what the client wants
· Use coach’s expertise to modify goals as needed
· Encourage client’s self-discovery and growth
· Nurture and evoke strategies and a plan of action based on what fits best with the client’s goals, personality and vision
· Foster client accountability to increase productivity
These aspects of the process all work together to allow the client to maximize his or her potential, and research shows that coaching and training is a far more effective combination than training alone. In fact, training alone can increase productivity by 22.4%, but when combined with weekly life coaching, productivity is boosted by 88%.
What is a mentor?
A lot of successful people acknowledge the role that a mentor has played in the success they have. With the right person guiding them, they had access to information and connections that would have been impossible to have if they were doing it alone.
A mentor can unlock many doors for those who have careers, are studying for a degree, venturing into business, have fitness goals, and are pursuing their passions.
What are the differences between Life Coaching and Mentoring?
1. Difference in focus
Coaching is related to tasks or issues. A coach is responsible to imbue certain skills in a trainee to be able to manage certain issues or events that they come across while doing a particular task. The coach is often an expert in the task or role and trains on faculties like management of a situation in efficient way, speaking confidently and fluently, thinking strategically and executing the task optimally for the best result.
Mentoring is focused on relationship. A mentor forms a more personal bonding with the mentoree, sharing the factors and situations that affect the professional and personal successes and failures. A mentor offers guidance beyond skills and expertise by including issues like work/life balance, boosting confidence, improving self-image, success mindset and how professional and personal life affect each other.
2. Difference in duration
Coaching is for a short time. Since coaching is for imparting skills and training required for a particular task or job, coaching takes place for a shorter duration. Coaching involves enriching the present skills or acquiring new skills required to attain the goal that the trainees have in mind. Once the task or job is done, the relation between the coach and the coachee is no longer necessary.
Mentoring is for a longer duration. A mentor may start with a goal, but extends his guidance beyond the expertise needed for the job. He forms a personal relationship with the mentoree by sharing experiences, boosting confidence and solving personal issues that might be affecting the professional life of the mentoree. These activities stretch for a much longer duration in both the mentor and the mentoree’s life. Hence mentoring always takes place for a longer duration than coaching.
3. Difference in design
Coaching does not have to be pre-designed. Coaching can be started immediately depending on the skills and ability of the coach. If a large number of coachee approaches a coach, e.g., a business deciding to give a group of its employees business coaching on a particular skill, a certain amount of design may be required mostly to make a schedule of the coaching hours and the evaluation of the trainees based on their performance, competencies and assessment tools. For a small group however, coaching can be started immediately even without a design.
Mentoring is always pre-designed. The design of mentoring relationship is required to determine the strategic purpose of the mentoring, the key performance areas, the specific mentoring models and specific components of the mentoring sessions. This design is very important specifically during the matching process when the relationship between the mentor and mentoree is developed.
For bookings or more information, please contact us.