]Coaching is a partnership between you and your coach to create a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires you to maximize your potential in life, which is particularly important in today’s uncertain and complex environment. We acknowledge, respect, and honor you as experts in their lives and work, and we believe that each is creative, resourceful, and whole. Standing on this foundation, the coach’s responsibility is to do the following:

• Discover, clarify, and align with what you want to achieve by working with Vital Knowledge Group coaches.
• Encourage you toward self-discovery
• Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies targeted toward their goals.
• Hold responsible and accountable.

This process helps you to dramatically improve their outlooks on work and life while enhancing their leadership; their emotional, social, and professional lives; and their skills, unlocking their potential.

Some reasons to work with a coach

An individual or team might choose to work with a coach for many reasons, including but not limited to the following:

• You or a team has an urgent, compelling, or existing challenge that is at stake (you desire to stretch a goal, or you are facing a challenge or opportunity).
• A gap exists in confidence, resources, knowledge, or skills.
• A strong desire to accelerate results exists.
• A lack of clarity with regard to choices that have to be made exists.
• Success has created a problematic reality.
• Life and work are out of balance, creating consequences for you or your team.
• You need to identify your core strengths and how to best leverage them.

What the coach will do, and what the individual needs to do

The coach:

• Provides objective assessments and observations that create an increased self-awareness and awareness of others within you.
• Diligently and effectively listens to the individual’s or team’s circumstances fully
• Creates a confidential and non-judgmental atmosphere to act as a sounding board for exploring possibilities and implementing them through thoughtful planning and decision-making
• Develops champions of opportunities and potential through the active encouragement of stretching one’s potential based on the strengths and aspirations of the person or team
• Creates new paradigms of thinking that create new and fresh perspectives
• Challenges a blind spot through the illumination of new possibilities, and supports the creation of alternative scenarios for the management of blind spots
• Maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession’s code of ethics

The individual:

• Creates the coaching agenda based on personal and meaningful goals
• Uses tools provided to assess and observe the self or the team to enhance self-awareness and the awareness of others
• Envisions personal and/or organizational success
• Assumes and accepts full ownership of personal decisions and actions
• Uses the coaching process to promote possibility thinking and new perspectives
• Undertakes courageous action in alignment with personal goals and aspirations
• Engages big-picture thinking and problem-solving skills
• Takes the tools, concepts, models, and principles that the coach provides, and participates in active forward-action steps