What is Coaching?
The essence of coaching is to raise awareness and empower choices to unlock people’s potential. I like to remind my clients that coaching is fundamentally different than consulting, mentoring, therapy or counselling. It is about helping a person to change in the way they want and helping them to bridge the gap between where they are now and where they want to be. In other words, it’s about empowering people to live the life they want.
Coaching can give you a better understanding of who you are, your beliefs and perceptions. It helps you to gain awareness and clarity about your strengths, and discover what might be holding you back in some cases. We will work together to discover new ways of thinking that will eventually influence your behaviour in the long-term, with the ultimate objective in mind: improve the quality of your life.
Coaching for Stress and Anxiety
Feeling stressed is something we all experience from time to time. There is the good stress, a temporary response to a particular situation, which can be motivational; and there is the chronic stress, which is persistent and has a direct impact on health and wellbeing. Some people may not even recognised they are stressed, because it can manifest in many different ways, affecting us physically, emotionally, mentally and socially. This highlights the need to listen to your body and the importance of the body and mind connection in order to be aware of the various stress symptoms.
The purpose of a stress-related coaching conversation is to offer you a sense of space, reflection and clarity, with the intention to understand the underlying causes of the stress rather than to fix the symptoms. Having awareness about your stressors is the key for you to be able to change habits and behaviours that lead to the stress. In some cases, the causes of stress cannot be controlled, especially if we talk about external stressors. Very often, it is our reaction to a particular situation that is stressful, not the situation itself. My role is to help you come up with strategies and healthy coping techniques to reduce the stress level and avoid falling into the chronic stress vicious loop.
Stress symptoms can show up physically, emotionally, cognitively and behaviourally, and the first step of a stress coaching is to understand how stress shows up for you.
Most Common Stress Symptoms:
- Sense of overwhelm
- Anxiety
- Difficulty sleeping
- Change in appetite
- Snapping at people
- Feeling tearful
- Shallow breathing
- Difficult decision making
- Headaches
- Digestive issues
- Chest Pain
- Dizziness
- Muscle tension
- High blood pressure
- Low grade fever
- Tiredness and fatigue