7 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Coaching

The following are some general tips for you to keep in mind, in order for you to get the most you can out of coaching with us:

1) Find a quiet, distraction-free place to go for your coaching calls.

2) Be open to learning new things about yourself. Perhaps there is something about yourself that you have been avoiding thinking about. Or perhaps the things that fit with who you are now and what works best for you, post-TBI, have shifted. By being open to learning more about yourself in the coaching process— and by being open to trying new things— you will be able to make more profound changes in yourself and in your life.

3) Be action-oriented: do your coaching homework. These are the tasks, actions, results or changes that you complete or experiment with in between coaching sessions. Typically, how much you will get out of coaching— and the pace of change that you will make in your life— will match the effort you put into doing your coaching homework, even on those weeks when your coaching homework does not attain its desired results.

4) Use failures as learning opportunities. As coaches, it will be our job to support you in accomplishing your coaching homework (i.e., the actions you choose for yourself between sessions). We request that for those parts of your coaching homework which you do not successfully accomplish, you are honest in exploring with your coach what kept you from moving forward with them. Failures and setbacks are part of the coaching process. By discussing what didn’t go as planned in a given week, you will get that much closer to finding the right ways to move forward for yourself.

5) Just because you have Post-Concussive Syndrome or a brain injury doesn't mean you can’t think big and play big. No problem is too small for coaching. And indeed, often to reach our big goals, we need to break them down into smaller ones and plan specific, smaller actions. However, we also encourage you to refer back regularly to the Big Picture, and to then fold that into the work that you do with your coach— so you can move towards achieving the vision of your future that inspires you.

6) Submit either your Coaching Call Prep Form or photos of your planner’s weekly review pages to your coach at least 12-48 hours before each session. This will give you time to reflect about your week and it should give your coach sufficient time to read what you wrote. That, in turn, will help you and your coach make better use of your coaching session time.

7) Prepare for your coaching session. Jot down things, in advance, you would like to talk about in your session. This is a good practice to get into not only for maximizing what you get out of each coaching session, but also for preparing for things you have to do in the rest of your life.