Life Coaching (also referred to as Personal Coaching) is a structured form of personal growth and a transformational process that focuses completely on YOU.
It is motivational, inspiring, positive, exciting and action driven. Life coaching helps assess where you are now; where you would like to be; and, helps bridge that gap. By raising awareness and encouraging you to take responsibility for your life, coaching helps you rise to the challenge and go further than you ever thought possible. back to top
Life coaching is all about focusing on your thought process and choices and not about events. In coaching, we often say, it’s not about the story; it’s about the meaning you give it and how you react to the story.
Life coaching offers a new way to move forward…beyond the story. Coaching gives you new ways of learning, growing and changing - allowing you to make easy, natural and lasting changes in your personal and professional life.
Life coaching is for people that are truly ready to create a successful life for themselves.
Life coaching can help with all aspects of your life: family, relationships, career, finances, living environments, health and spirituality. back to top
A Coaching relationship typically begins with a personal interview to clearly identify your present opportunities and challenges; explain the process; and get an agreement on the structure & format. It’s also a chance for you and the coach to see if you are the best “fit” for each other.
Each coaching session lasts for approximately 60 minutes - usually once a week. Between scheduled sessions, you will be asked to complete specific actions that support you in achieving the goals you set for yourself. The duration of the coaching relationship varies depending on the coaching program and your personal needs and preferences.
Coaching sessions are conducted either in-person or by phone. Most of our clients prefer phone sessions since it is convenient and also allows for a deep level of communication with the least amount of interruptions. Email me to set up a Complimentary Introductory Session. back to top
Who hires a coach? Is it for me?
A coach is for anyone who is motivated to make a change in his or her life. Almost anyone who is ready to stop doing what isn’t working and start doing things that do work will benefit from having a coach.
People from all walks of life work with a coach. Absolutely anyone can benefit from coaching as long as you have the desire to be coached and make significant changes in your life. If you are truly ready to create a successful life for yourself - then you are ready for coaching.
Clients come from diverse backgrounds – from corporate executives to single mothers - and each one of them comes to coaching with unique goals. They all have one thing in common, though - the desire to make significant changes in their lives.
Sometimes we limit ourselves, or get “stuck”; perhaps your life has changed; you’re in a new relationship or in the midst of divorce; maybe your children have left home; or maybe you believe there’s more out there and want to find out what the ‘more’ might be for you.
It could be as simple as always having the desire to do something different – run a marathon, write the book you know is just waiting for you, learn a new language – and you’re not sure how to overcome the challenges that keep you from getting there.
Everyone needs someone who believes in their abilities and you can be assured that your coach believes in you. But, a coach is more than that. A coach is specifically trained to help you set clear goals to achieving the life you want. Your coach will hold your vision in front of you until you have realized it for yourself.
So, who hires a coach? People just like you. back to top
What does “Integrative Coach Professional™” mean?
An Integrative Coach Professional™ is a highly skilled and trained life coach through the Ford Institute of Integrative Coaching. We are licensed to coach using specific coaching models that were designed by Debbie Ford. The proprietary processes we use to help you unlock your most passionate dreams and step away from unfulfiling behaviors – is what makes this title so distinctive and important.
Karen Ciandella is a highly skilled, trained and certified Integrative Coach Professionals™ operating independently of Debbie Ford and the Ford Institute.
What is Integrative Coaching?
Integrative Coaching is a unique coaching method designed to support you in becoming whole and fully expressed. By embracing all aspects of who you are as well as all of your life experiences you become open to receiving the wisdom of all your life’s lessons and claiming the magnificence of who you truly are. Together, you and your coach will uncover those limiting beliefs that hi-jack you and limits your ability to be at your best, controls your day-to-day decisions or negatively affect you and the people around you. Think about it for a moment – where in your life are you limited by your beliefs and habits? What things have you always wanted to do and accomplish, but never have? What stops you? What gets in your way?
Integrative Coaching takes you beneath the surface of your thoughts and behaviors and brings your head and your heart into alignment.
Integrative Coaching is designed to support you to access and come to trust your own innate wisdom and intelligence. Unlike traditional counseling or therapy where you look to someone else for guidance, Integrative Coaching guides you to surface your own answers and internal guidance using advanced exercises and techniques that support you in looking within for your own answers.
Integrative Coaching is Life Learning. Integrative coaching models are distinct from many other types of coaching in that they are specifically designed to teach you new life perspectives, distinctions, practices and skills. In each of your coaching sessions, you will be taught a new concept to empower you in understanding and handling the circumstances and experiences of your life. Between sessions, you may also be given exercises and reading to support you in integrating the lessons and knowledge to shift your way of being in the world forever.
Each of our coaching models are designed to be profound and life altering transformational journeys, which span the course of approximately four months. During this time, your coach will guide you through a deliberate and proven coaching process that consistently produced breakthrough results. Structured, yet flexible, extra sessions can be added to an existing program to meet your personal needs, address a specific situation or further integrate a particular step. back to top
What is Adoption Reunion Coaching?
Have you been touched by Adoption? Adoption Reunion Coaching is a special program for birth mothers, adoptees or adoptive parents involved in or contemplating a Search or Reunion. More than likely you are dealing with a multitude feelings that can be unsettling. Some of those feelings may be anticipation, uncertainty, doubt and excitement as well as of fear, worry and overwhelm.
If you are thinking about a Reunion, Adoption Reunion Coaching provides a safe place to explore your feelings and supports you in this life changing journey. During this coaching, you will learn life-long tools that will serve you not only during your Search or Reunion but for years to come. You can expect to be inspired, gain clarity, insight, a new perspective and a deeper understanding of your needs and wants as well as the courage to move forward. back to top
What is Healing Our Hearts Birthmother Coaching?
Any woman that has been separated by her child through adoption knows the emptiness that is in her heart. Birthmother coaching is a way to move beyond that emptiness. No matter what our personal experience of adoption or surrender was it changed us.
In addition to the trauma of that life changing event, we made that mean something about us. We created the story of who we were and who we became from that time in our lives. Birthmother coaching is about changing our story, from releasing ourselves from the shadow of that event and looking to a new, more empowered way of being in the world. We not only gave birth to a child but we gave birth to our own shadow.
Educating ourselves, spiritually and emotionally, brings about healing. Integrating the shadow we created as a result of our experiences is healing. Navigating through our feelings of grief and loss brings us safely back to wholeness. Healing allows us to consciously choose how we move on from here. Believe it or not, our gifts reside in our wounded hearts. Together we will find the gifts. back to top
What Is A Spiritual Divorce?
Based on Debbie Ford’s cutting edge work “Spiritual Divorce” this coaching method will help you use the crisis of your divorce or other broken relationships to improve your life. You will begin to see that the biggest loss of all is the loss of self. Through this process your experience becomes one of gain rather than loss. Instead of staying stuck in the pain of your broken heart, a spiritual divorce calls you to reconnect with the highest aspects of your being. Whether you’ve experienced a divorce, the end or loss of a relationship, or want to shift your relationship with some aspect of your life, you can use this pain as a catalyst to an extraordinary life. back to top
I noticed you used the term Shadow, what is a Shadow?
Everyone has a shadow. Part of evolving as humans is bringing awareness to all the aspects of our lives. Shadow literally means obscuring the light. A shadowed aspect of ourselves is a part of us we do not identify with. It could be an emotion or a quality that we don’t relate to. It’s any part of ourselves that that we’ve become misidentified with.
We begin to find our shadow by looking at the things that bother us in other people – for example, anger , jealousy or judgment– behavior we know we do but deny. Sometimes, we see this as someone else’s stuff – not ours. That’s a good place to begin working with our shadow. When we reclaim and reintegrate those parts of ourselves we have disowned, rejected or denied we become more aware of ourselves and how we experience the world.
We can’t change anything we don’t know. We have to be willing to see the part we play in attracting certain things into our lives. We can’t change other people so we must be aware of our selves. When we are aware of our own shadows – the light and the dark – we are able to make choices about our own behavior. Looking at our shadows requires self honesty, inner work, and courage.
The beauty of shadow work: To know yourself fully allows you to be free. There is gold in our dark. It’s up to us to find the gift of our shadows. back to top
Are Coaching Sessions done in person?
Almost all Integrative Coaching is done over the phone so that you can engage in the process from the privacy and comfort of your own home or office. Therefore, you can work with your regardless of your geographical proximity to one another.
Want more information or schedule a complimentary consultation? Contact me and we can talk in more detail. back to top
What is Emotional and Spiritual Education?
Emotional education is the process of becoming more consciously aware of our thoughts.
Spiritual Education helps us heal our own consciousness through personal development and awareness
Every human being experiences emotions. Becoming aware of these emotions is at the heart of emotional education. Without awareness, emotions can control our lives. As a person becomes more consciously aware of their feelings and their thoughts they begin to gain greater control of their actions, their choices and their lives. It provides a way of understanding ourselves in a deeper way. Emotional education allows us to manage and express our emotions more authentically, build and deepen the quality of our relationships and deal with difficult situations more effectively. Emotional Education is a continuous learning process. It is powerful, insightful and challenging. Emotional education is the foundation for our spiritual growth.
Spiritual Education is really about a consciously awareness that helps a person to achieve “Self Mastery” and develop emotional maturity. Emotions and negative thoughts, words or events no longer control you and your life. Once you truly understand yourself, and learn to honesty review and learn from your own experiences, you also understand how you created and attract situations, conditions and people in your life. It’s about learning from self and having the courage to own what we feel and create. Once you live in that awareness and recognize the positive impact you can have in your life, you can also accept that the power of your own spiritual awareness, self mastery and healing has on your relationships, career, the community and the world. back to top
Is this style of Coaching connected with Religion in any way?
As Integrative Coaches we are not attached to any discipline or doctrine, because we know that by each of us fulfilling our full potential, we add to our Universe in a way that on one else can. Spiritual Coaching is not religious based. It is clearly our client’s personal choice to follow and practice his or her own faith. Spiritual Coaching is about encouraging clients to follow their own hearts, their inner wisdom and access their own Divine Guidance. Spiritual Coaching supports you in living to the fullest, integrating all parts of your being – mind, body and spirit. back to top
How does Coaching differ from Therapy?
The top three differences between coaching and therapy are as follows:
1. The relationship that the client has with coach is based on equality
2. The client in coaching is facing temporary life challenges and desires to move forward. They are self generating and able to complete work.
3. A coaching relationship has a measurable short term goal and is built on a vision.
Spiritual Coaching includes an integrated approach to developing the whole person. It addresses the emotional (feelings), cognitive (thinking patterns), physical (body connection) and spiritual areas of growth. Because the work we do is based on accessing your own inner wisdom and knowing we operate at a deeper level, allowing you to see how you experience yourself and the world.
Spiritual Coaching allows clients to become more competent in their relationships, in their professional lives, in understanding themselves and in affecting the world around them.
The following table lists the key distinctions of Therapy vs. Coaching
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Therapy
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Coaching
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1. Focus on Past
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1. Focus on Future/Now
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2. Past and Feeling Driven
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2. Vision Driven
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3. Healing
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3. Educational
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4. Relationship is Agent of Change
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4. Client is Agent of Change
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5. Relationship Focused
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5. Process Focused
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6. Resolving Issues
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6. Solving Problems
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7. Client needs Help
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7. Wants a Partner
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8. Pain
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8. Frustration
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9. Do not Disclose
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9. Uses disclosure to move client
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10. Conditions; Chaos; Turmoil
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10. Has everyday life events
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11. Client as Patient
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11. Client as Partner
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How do I find a coach that will help me?
Interview a few coaches and trust your inner guidance system to let you know who will fit.
You will know you have found your ideal coach when:
· You feel related to your coach
· You feel safe and supported
· You feel a very strong mutual trust with your coach
· You feel a very strong mutual care and respect with your coach
· You feel the power of the full attention and energies from your coach
· You feel the confidence and experience of your coach to guide you to your goals
· You know that your coach chose to specialize in coaching you as their ideal client before he or she met you. back to top
How do I know if I’m ready to be coached?
You have total control over your degree of readiness to reap the full rewards from coaching. You will determine the degree of your readiness and the benefit of working with me when you positively answer the following questions:
- How committed are you to achieving your goal(s)?
- How willing are you to accept new perspectives?
- How willing are you to invest something of value (time/ money) in yourself?
- How willing are you to take the actions you and your coach uncover to shift limiting beliefs, expose your shadows and underlying commitments and achieve your goal(s)? back to top
You are likely to benefit from working with me if:
- You are willing to take some risks to be emotionally, spiritually and physically balanced.
- You are willing to accept new perspectives and are open to questioning some limiting beliefs
- You are tired of the way things are and are willing to work at making significant changes in your life.
- You are willing to learn something new, think new/different thoughts and change some existing habits, patterns or behaviors
- You are willing step out of what is known and comfortable to do whatever it takes, to be open minded and focused.
- You are willing to invest in yourself
- You are ready to face your fears and commit to honest, straightforward, “ruthlessly compassionate” support
- You are excited about making significant changes in your life
- You are committed to (or willing to) being vulnerable, honest, compassionate and self honoring during your process
- You are willing to give yourself the gift of your own self love and acknowledgement. back to top
How do I get started working with you?
Coaching is a partnership so it's important that we feel we can work together and you feel that you comfortable, safe and supported. Call or email me to set up a time an Introductory session. We can talk, introduce ourselves, explore what program you think will work best for you and what you would like to accomplish during our time together. I can't wait to hear from you. In fact, why don't you send me an email. karen@inspireonecoaching.com