Research Paper By Rania Sabry
(Life Coach, EGYPT)
1. Who are the main players in this case study
The main players are:
2. What is the core problem or challenge you applied your coaching skills to?
Rebecca is a young single lady who has been living away from her home country for 9 years now. she moved between 3 countries for work and in love of the country, sometimes was by choice and other times came as a coincidence. Her min focus is to enjoy life and go around the world, though she has doubts she can do that due to her low paying job.
Her challenge was whether she should change career or invest more in same career to develop and grow more.
2. What specific coaching skills or approach did you use in this case?
Active listening
Rebecca talks a lot, jumps from one subject to there other, confused and judgmental, cares a lot about what people would say about her, I needed to understand more from where is this coming so I listened a lot to fear and people’s perception about her and about her job, comparison between her pay and her last boyfriend. Out of our sessions, only first 2 sessions were about career coaching then she switched to whether this job is going to help her achieve her dream or she’ll keep working hopelessly.
Visualisation
I gave Rebecca twice Visualisation exercise to answer then we can discuss next session, once was about her career, and the second about her dream trip. She didn’t complete the career one ever, stacked and took her very long, the trip one she not only was able to visualize, she even acted on the visualisations that she had and added her name to a mailing list to track the trip schedule.
Powefull Questions
We spent good time with some powerful questions about her intimidation from people perceptions and from colleagues, she likes to be on her own, yet, like to tell people that she did this and that without showing photos and bragging. She wants to be perceived as a happy person and want to achieve happiness. Doesn’t really care if she has another boyfriend and definitely not into children, simply she wants to see the world and know more about each and every country she visits.
Underlying Beliefs
Rebecca was under the impression that growing in her career is very important to her and she has to prioritise that, she thought she wouldn’t be able to grow and study at the same time enjoy her life and achieve her dreams. It took her around 4 sessions to realise that there is more time into the day to organise herself and do more, and she is now going 3 times a week to the GYM, taking herself out to lunch every Saturday enjoying a favourable place with a book of her choice.
Acknowledgment and Awareness
Rebecca struggles al the time to understand more about herself she wanted to know more about herself, I supported her by guiding to “Strength finder” questionnaire , “Ocupational Personality Questionnaire” and the “Language of Love” questionnaire. She was both surprised and happy with the discoveries. I acknowledged her need to know more about herself and we discussed how would she use this discoveries in her future.
Rebecca also admitted that she is happy and satisfied with her career, she is proud of the growth she is going through with her study, and she started connecting with old colleagues who can help her in her study.
Creating action
When Rebecca started looking for her dream trip, she had an estimate budget that she checked years ago, she was totally shocked to find that the price has doubles since she last checked. She sent me an email saying, “Still there are much more alternatives that I can pick from or may be I’ll consider buying a big house at my home country”
3. Explain your process in detail
We started by the foundation, then Rebecca started talking about herself how she was raised up with her family, her misfortune in studying, her jobs when she was studying, her travels and leaving the country to work, how she realised how much she liked traveling and exploring.
Then we reached our primary coaching objective through some reflective questions and it was all about her career choices and going on her current job or shifting the career.
We moved through the sessions discussing the career through powerful questions when she had a realisation that it’s not about her career that’s not making her happy, it’s her inability to achieve her dream. Here comes her awareness and “goal planning on a drawing board” as she called it. We now successfully reached the secondary and real coaching objective.
During this process, We also explored a lot the underlying beliefs that she had about the people’s perception and judgement of her. We worked on judgemental opinions and her fear / happiness. She also realised that her core values are very important to her and she would never sacrifice her value system for any reason.
We began in the planning and Goal Setting phase, she started by subscribing to the mailing list of her dream trip, contacting them, and inquiring about her trip details and financials. She then faced another milestone, the trip was double the price she knew it costs, and surprisingly on her own she came back next session with actions designed for herself and alternative solutions to either another trip or buying a house at her home country.
She spent good amount of time visualising her trip, though she failed in visualising her career choices or even thinking about it for long.
4. What were the results of your process? Was your coaching/program effective? Why? Why not?
Rebecca gained a lot of self-awareness, an even broader idea of possibilities, and much more belief in herself. The coaching was successful because she was at a point in her life losing self confidence completely and feeling sorry for herself, she gained confidence and went back to her unrealised dream and to the things that usually make her happy. She realised that most of her concerns are not a real primary concerns for her and that was the main success for her, realising the real challenge.
5. If you could approach this problem again, what would you do differently?
Nothing, I trust that the process went well to serve the client and she achieved her objective.
6. What are the top 3 things you learnt from this experience?