Supporting Personal, Family, and Organizational Wellbeing
Click here for the Coaching FAQ
Business Ownership Coaching
Business Owners face additional responsibilities that chief executives running other companies don’t face. The success of the business rests on their shoulders, and their own professional and financial success is tied to the success of the business. A chief executive can resign and move to another position, or even find another position after being dismissed. A Business Owner can’t step aside so easily.
Business Owners, especially those with small businesses, have to wear multiple hats and juggle multiple responsibilities. This is even more true during start-up and growth phases.
Having highly trained people filling specialized roles may be the ultimate vision, but early on the owner and sometimes a small support team are filling all the roles. This demand on time, energy, and resources is highly stressful, leading to distraction, irritation, frustration, and self-doubt.
For professionals who own their own firm or practice, it can be even more challenging. They are highly skilled and successful at the professional activity, but business ownership is a different world. Unlike the organized, systematic academic training and professional supervision received as a professional, the learning experienced as a Business Owner is haphazard, inconsistent, and sometimes contradictory.
On top of that, many Business Owners started their own businesses so they could reach meaningful personal and family goals. But the demands of running the business often wind up imposing on personal and family time, creating an unhealthy lifestyle and damaging family relationships.
Business Ownership Coaching supports the Business Owner as a Whole Life Leader, applying a guiding vision across the many domains of life in multiple roles. It supports the development of an integrated Life Design that includes personal definitions of success and meaning in all domains and roles. It supports the development of skills and strengths for managing the multiple competing responsibilities more responsively and less reactively, with flexibility and resilience.
Business Family Coaching
Business Family Coaching sits at the intersection of Business Ownership Coaching and Family Life Coaching. Family members who own and run a business together face unique challenges. Their roles as family members can complicate their roles on the business leadership team. Likewise, their roles on the business leadership team can complicate their family relationships.
Business Family Coaching helps Business Family members get clear about their distinct roles on the Business Leadership Team and within the family.
It facilitates co-creation of an agreement for ground rules for operating as a Business Leadership Team in ways that respect and promote the family as the priority, so the business serves and supports the family instead of draining or harming the family. It facilitates co-creation of an agreement for ground rules for operating as a Family Group in ways that also allow members to function at work as a Business Leadership Team and fulfill those responsibilities, while respecting and promoting the family as the priority.
Business Family Coaching helps Business Family members distinguish between establishing roles on the Business Leadership Team based on strengths and competencies and respecting roles in the Family Group based on family history, tradition, and relationship. It also supports establishing clear communication and conflict management guidelines to professionalize workplace interactions and minimize the impact of power struggles and historical conflict between family members on the business. Most importantly, it supports the Family Group in establishing ground rules for the Family Group that can improve communication and relationships, even when they have been rocky for years.
Family Life Coaching
Family Life Coaching supports people in making family a top priority. When something is a priority, it is considered first and considered more important. People who want family to come first and value it as important deeply respect the role of family in providing lifelong supportive relationships. These relationships promote the social, emotional, relational, and spiritual development of children into thriving, connected, contributing adults. And they support and connect family members throughout their lifespan and provide meaning to important events.
Family Life Coaching supports parents as family leaders, especially parents with children in the home. Parental leadership is similar to other forms of leadership since it carries the responsibility for creating and sharing a guiding vision, defining and instilling culture, establishing rules and guidelines, and promoting the growth and development of those led. It is very unique in the level of responsibility for others, starting with total responsibility for infant children and only slowly decreasing until adolescence. Then, with adolescence, the balance between parents’ responsibility and the teen’s responsibility becomes murky and can create conflict. This evolving nature of the parents’ role as the child grows and matures creates a complicated dynamic.
Family Life Coaching helps parents define their guiding vision, define the family culture they want to instill, clarify rules and guidelines, and understand child and adolescent development so they can support their children’s healthy choices, healthy behavior, and growth of character. It facilitates the design of family norms, family priorities, and meaningful rituals and supports parents in communicating these with their children in a visionary, inviting way.
Family Life Coaching also supports the Family as Team. As children approach and then enter adolescence, they develop more independence, explore their own style, and become more distinct as individuals. Encouraging cooperation and engagement becomes more challenging. One way to makes this easier is approaching the Family as Team, with parents as leaders but also as team members and the children as valued team members. The Family Life Coaching model for Family as Team includes coaching the parents as team leaders and also coaching the family as a team. This empowers the parents to learn a coaching approach to facilitating family discussions and empowers the Family as Team to learn to function with a respectful, open, connected coaching approach.
Academic and Career Coaching
Academic and Career Coaching is closely related to Family Life Coaching. It is beneficial for people trying to choose a career path and decide what formal education or training they need to pursue that career. Much of the time these are older teenagers and young adults, high school age and traditional college age. Because parents are often involved in the decision and may be helping pay for education, a Family Life Coaching approach works well. Also, since this stage of life involves the young adult separating from the family to move towards establishing their own home and family, involving the family can be beneficial.
Sometimes adults older than traditional college age need the benefit of Academic and Career Coaching. Often, though, this still involves a component of Family Life Coaching.
Family considerations are often important factors when considering a career change, from seeking a partner’s emotional and financial support to planning for the impact on family life and parenting. The Life and Work Design process for career changers includes all these considerations.
Academic and Career Coaching supports the exploration and discovery of strengths, aptitudes, talents, values, and general style, which can incorporate personality types or simply a way of being in the world. Through an expanded perspective, beyond merely what subjects the person enjoys studying or what sort of job sounds interesting, Academic and Career Coaching promotes development of a comprehensive Life and Work Design that includes many facets. Once the design is developed, coaching becomes regular support for creating and implementing the plan to moves towards the envisioned design.
Click here for the Coaching FAQ
