A coach can provide you with a supportive, non-judgmental space to talk about your stressors and help you develop personalized coping strategies. With a coach by your side, you can not only reduce stress levels, but also gain a new perspective and a renewed sense of empowerment. The goal of a coach is to offer you a sense of space, reflection and clarity. When it comes to stress, the coach's goal is to help you understand the root causes, rather than to “correct” the symptoms.
This is achieved through a series of conversations in which the coach will ask you questions to help you understand better and offer you ideas or reflections that you may not have considered. Stress isn't due to what we think, to an external fact, to a deadline, or to a comment. It's because of the story we tell ourselves about the stressful event. It's our reaction to the event that makes it stressful.
That's good, because it means we have the power to change that reaction and the story that feeds it and stop the stress response. Coaching can help reduce stress because of its potential to influence the secondary evaluation process.5, 16 Working with a coach can teach people to identify their stressors, to evaluate them as less threatening, and to encourage them to address them more effectively. When you reach the end of your training, you'll be able to reflect on the progress you've made and come up with an action plan for how you're going to move forward without your coach. Nor can the environment in which the training takes place; after all, the training does not take place in a vacuum.
While this is most often seen when training high-performing employees, the same potential for increasing confidence exists when training those who are underperforming. She is a member of the International Coaching Federation and the Institute for Personalized Care, which means that she is qualified to work as a health consultant in the National Health Service.
