How I Work

Coaches can mainly be distinguished by their approach and counseling methods. Based on my experience, the Solution Focused Brief Counseling/Coaching approach yields the best results for you in a given time.

"[We] define coaching as partnering with the clients in a thought provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential [...]. Coaches honor the client as the expert in his or her life and work, and believe every client is creative, resourceful and whole. Standing on this foundation, the coach´s responsibility is to:

• Discover, clarify and align with what the client wants to achieve
• Encourage client self-discovery
• Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
• Hold the client responsible and accountable

This process helps clients dramatically improve their outlook on work and life, while improving leadership skills and unlocking potential."

Quoted from Mendenez/Williams:
Becoming a Professional Life Coach: Lessons from the Institute of Life Coach Training

Solution Focused Brief Counseling or Coaching (SFBC) is derived from Solution Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) that was developed by Insoo Kim Berg, Steve de Shazer and other counseling professionals. For you as a coachee, these aspects are especially important:

• Our usual, every day approach to solving problems is to investigate the problem thoroughly first in order to find a proper solution.
• In Solution Focused Counseling, we rather think that it is more helpful to focus on solutions, cause in human problems (other than for example with a broken car), it is often not necessary to understand the problem in depth, because the solution very often does not have a logical link to the problem.
  Furthermore, it can empirically be shown that approaches focused on the problem rather than on solutions have the tendency to aggravate the coachee´s problem. Steve de Shazer, one of the founders of the solution focused approach, summed it up in a sentence:
  "Problem talk creates problems. Solution talk creates solutions."
  
• For you as my customer and coachee this means: My objective for any single session is to help you find at least a partial solution for the issue we have been talking about, a "next step". This also means that after each single session you can decide for yourself if you think this solution is good enough for the moment or if you would like to explore further options.