A typical coaching session lasts 60 minutes (over Zoom/GoogleMeets/Skype/telephone), or can be conducted by weekly email exchange.
My coaching works by offering you an ally who fully understands creative processes and the creative mindset, and who recognises the importance of approaching life creatively.
We start by understanding your situation fully – what you enjoy about your current activities, what the main ups and downs of your creative life have been, and any challenges, frustrations, or obstacles you face in moving forward. Our work will then often be focused on identifying clearer goals, fully understanding any problems you’re facing (including those specific to the field you’re working in) plus your particular strengths, and brainstorming possible paths forward that really suit you. I help creative people professionalise, gain clarity, and harness energy in a focused, strategic direction. A significant outcome from our sessions will be tangible, actionable plans for next steps and good habits that you feel genuinely motivated to pursue. And a sense that you now have someone alongside you who understands how important your creative practice or creative business is, someone who can help you move forward with it.
My coaching/mentoring is very much client-led and question-based, aiming to empower you to find the answers that are right for you, rather than tell you what to do or think. You decide what you want to work on and prioritise. And through the supportive, reflective space provided within the sessions, you decide your route forward, so that your next steps are ones you’re enthusiastic about!
Sometimes we’ll end up identifying something “upstream” of or “underlying” the specifics of the problem you had brought to discuss – something happening earlier in the process, such that when you resolve this, it unlocks in a more long-term, transferable way the specific situation you’re finding challenging and then lots of other similar situations in the future. And we might do this by thinking about the language you’re instinctively using to describe things, because often working with language helps us dissolve unconscious blocks in a powerful, creative way.
I began my career initially in business, including working as an international strategy consultant for clients such as Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, and American Express. Then I had an epiphany of sorts and and left that life behind in 2001 to become a published poet, fiction writer and freelance tutor, before moving into mentoring and coaching. So my life has straddled the practical world of business AND a purely creative arena where play, innovation, expression and joy are the focus.
Think of our work together as a solution-focused chat with an informed creative ally. It’s as simple and as powerful as that!
Sessions can be spread over whatever time period suits you and your project. (NB I may nevertheless recommend holding sessions fortnightly or monthly rather than weekly, so that you can make tangible progress on next steps between sessions.)
You can ask a question through this form below:
Testimonials here.
Further information: what a Creativity Coach can help you with.
Further information: about my coaching background.