Session-at-a-Time Coaching

Owning and Running a Business is Challenging

If all you had to do was “practice”, or focus on what you do best, your life might be simpler. However, your reality is not that simple; you are running a business.

There are 5 Meta Challenges that affect your business. Each one has 3 sub-challenges. More on these Meta Challenges can be found here. Let’s examine one: Owner Engagement.

Owner Engagement describes how engaged you are with your own enterprise. The three top sub-challenges are: i) Motivation, ii) Family and Societal Systems; and iii) Innovation and Relevance.

Let’s examine Motivation. We see business owners who are working in the business, but everything for them seems mechanical and rote. The work ethic is there, the spark is not. Meaning has become elusive, Owner Engagement diminishes and the business falters.

The 5 Meta Challenges and their sub-challenges create problems in your business. With help some can be solved and some can be managed.

Session-at-a-Time Coaching is Goal Driven

This is a 60-minute coaching session. When you work with Session-at-a-Time Coaching the agenda is developed by you. The session model is: Focus and Agenda Setting (10-15 minutes); Working on the Issue (30-40 minutes); and then Next Steps (10-15 minutes). You also complete a little prework prior to the session.

This is not a “watered-down” form of longer-term coaching. Indeed, longer-term coaching is important and relevant; it is a service that is core to our work. But sometimes you need to work on something that is top-of-mind, just like Lisa in the case below.

Lisa is a successful financial advisor. With an excellent reputation, professional office space, and with three employees her business was humming. However, over the past few months the hum was turning into a drone. A promising employee was missing deadlines. She had spoken with them, but didn’t know if it was her leadership skills, or the employee’s abilities. She was experiencing a specific issue; so that became our focus.

We did not get dragged down into the problems, but rather explored and discussed examples of her successful leadership (of which she has many!). From this newly-developed catalogue, Lisa formulated her own leadership model, which she then applied to resolve her staff problem.

Session-at-a-Time Coaching is your 60 minutes. You develop the agenda, and then you and your coach work together towards the outcomes you identified. Session-at-a-Time Coaching is a goal-driven activity. You may not “solve” the problem during your session, but you will leave with a better understanding of how to do so.

Evidence-Based Practice and Practice-Based Evidence

Session-at-a-Time Coaching is based on the principles of Brief Therapy (you can see more on that here). Interesting research in the brief therapy field shows, on average, that 50-60% of clients got what they needed from one therapeutic session. Remarkable really. That doesn’t mean they never returned for further therapy (they often did). What the research demonstrates is that one session got them going and feeling they could manage on their own. Follow-up research with clients shows the positive outcomes remained. This can be seen in the Session-at-a-Time coaching example below.

Julia and James own and operate a professional services business. Julia runs the business and James the practice. They have three locations with staff and practitioners in each location. It is a busy, complex business. Oh, they are also married to one another. Their business and family lives converged, and they said they “couldn’t get a break”. Tension was high. During the agenda setting they figured out what they wanted for the business and also developed some experiments to try post-session. They booked another session. They came back four more times after that, each session showed increasing progress.

Session-at-a-Time Coaching is “Problem Agnostic”

What does that mean? We mean that what you are facing doesn’t have to be clear and defined. It can be a feeling, a sense, it may not even have a form yet. It could be something troubling, or something really positive!

The core need you feel is to talk with another professional about what is on your mind. Someone objective and supportive. Someone you feel is unequivocally on your side.

Getting Going With Session-at-a-Time Coaching

It’s easy. To find out if Session-at-a-Time Coaching is for you, simply email Matthew Asser directly (matthew.asser@asserinc.com), or use our contact form.