Some people are just naturally good coaches. Maybe you are one of them. Do your co-workers and friends ever approach you with problems and ask for your thoughts and guidance? Has your manager ever requested that you help mentor a new employee at the work place? If so, the people around you have already seen the great coaching potential you possess. It is time to unlock that potential with an accredited coach training program that offers executive coaching certification!
What is an accredited coach training program? The best ones will give you the tools that you need to become a successful coach, solve problems, and craft creative solutions. A good accredited coach training program will show the philosophy and methodology of being a good coach as well as offering you practicum to put your lessons into action.
“If I am already a good coach, why do I need to take courses?” Good question. Here are a few ways that accredited coach training can help you make a bigger difference:
Improve on Nature
You may have natural talent, but it is still raw and unpolished. To succeed, talent needs to be shaped, moulded, and developed into something that works. Think of it like a gifted athlete: a naturally-good hockey player first needs to learn how to skate, how to handle a stick, and then all the strategies and techniques used by the best players of the past. It works the same with coaching. You might have an instinct for it, but coach training will shape your abilities, improve on nature, and offer knowledge on new strategies that you might not even know about.
Gives Credentials
In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need a piece of paper to tell people that we are good at something - we would just show them. But it isn’t a perfect world and people like to see proof of what you can do. An accredited coach training program offers the official credentials that you can offer to future employers or clients.
Attract Clients
With executive coaching certification under your belt, you can get start making coaching as part of your professional profile. The certification will help convince potential clients of your skills and experience as an executive coach. In turn, this will help to…
Increase Your Revenue
Accredited coach training will give you a significant and desired skill set in the professional world. This certification will present you with the opportunity to increase your role at your current workplace, moonlight as an executive coach, seek new opportunities, or even go into business as a full-time business coach. Whatever path you choose, you can increase your income.
Looking for an accredited coach training program so you can make a difference in your life and the lives of others? Look no further than the FLOW Coaching Institute, the premier executive coaching certification program in Toronto. Using the exclusive FLOW Coach Method, our talented instructors will guide you throughout our five modules and the final supervised practicum to help you become a successful coach. The FLOW Coaching Institute is an Accredited Coach Training Program (ACTP). Contact us today and find out how you can make a difference with coaching!
Running a successful business can be both thrilling and stressful. Business owners and executives are responsible for overseeing every aspect of their business and it can be hard to ensure that you are making the most of every opportunity. As a result, many business leaders explore executive coaching in an effort to support and facilitate business growth. Hiring a qualified business coach in Toronto can help you improve your leadership and help you unlock your potential, but be aware that you have to be ready to do the work!
Finding the right Toronto business coach is no different than working with any other field expert, like a personal trainer or a language tutor, to help you learn and expand your skills and abilities. When you have the right guidance and direction, chances are your results will be achieved much faster and will produce a greater impact. A professional and qualified business coach can help you access your strengths and weaknesses, help you develop a business action plan, and push you to move forward with intention.
So, we’ve talked a bit about what a great business coach will do, but what about what you need to do when you commit to working with a business coach?
When you make the decision to commit to executive coaching and find a coach that fits with your needs, here is what you should be prepared to do in order to get the most out of your coaching experience.
Be Financially Prepared
While cost can vary when it comes to business coaches, it is important to set your budget and be prepared to make a financial commitment. Hiring a business coach is a thoughtful investment in yourself and your business and you have to be prepared to invest enough in order to see results. Talk to your coach about what a realistic timeframe for coaching might be and how often you will meet with them as you progress through your coaching in order to better understand the potential financial outlay.
Be Prepared To Make the Time
You will need to carve out time to meet with your business coach regularly (you and your coach will decide on what schedule will work) and you have to commit to keeping those appointments a priority! In addition to meetings with your coach, there will be added time needed to work through your plans and goals and put new strategies into practice.
Be Prepared To Listen
In order to get the most out of your coaching sessions, you have to be ready to listen, and by that we mean listen actively, even if you don’t like what you hear. Your inner voice may be ready to dismiss new ideas or convince you that you can’t do what your coach is asking. You have to stay open and be ready to digest and consider the recommendations and the information being shared with you.
Be Prepared To Change
You will continue to experience the same results unless you are willing to commit to change. Change is hard, but if you want to achieve substantial growth, you need to be prepared to make significant changes. The great news is that with the help of a fantastic business coach, you will learn how to engage your self-motivation, step outside your comfort zone, increase your focus, and identify your strengths and weaknesses. All key factors in achieving the results you want.
If you’ve got ambitious goals for your business, the right business coach can help you meet your targets. Many leaders struggle with executing their leadership plans, but with a business coach you will have consistent support to keep you accountable and to help you set up, monitor, and evaluate your progress.
Ready to do the work and move forward? The FLOW Coaching Institute can help. Our team of expert coaches can facilitate team or individual coaching and has experience designing programs that will enhance performance and create positive change. To find out more about working with the FLOW Coaching Institute, please contact us.
Those who have completed life coach certification have the ability to help others gain a deeper self-awareness and a clearer understanding of how to handle life’s challenges and obstacles. When you acquire a new perspective, you learn to handle individual events with grace and courage, and can experience a life changing shift that alters your entire way of thinking. A successful life coach helps you to create meaningful and long lasting change that will maximize your life.
If you have ever thought that you want to improve your self-confidence, achieve your goals faster, evolve to the best version of yourself, or enhance the relationships in your life, it sounds like it’s time for you to find a life coach.
In broad terms, a life coach can help you stay focused on your goals and aspirations and teach you how to reach your full potential. The International Coach Federation (ICF) defines coaching as "partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential, which is particularly important in today's uncertain and complex environment. Coaches honor the client as the expert in his or her life and work and believe every client is creative, resourceful and whole.”
The ICF Coaching Certification teaches coaches to:
Working with a coach who has successfully completed life coach certification will help you improve your outlook on all aspects of your life.
It is important to note that life coaching differs from traditional therapy. More specifically, coaching focuses on the future while therapy typically focuses on exploring the past. Working with a life coach will help you create an action plan aimed at improving your current and future life.
Still not convinced you could benefit from a life coach?
If you’ve got dreams and aspirations that seem out of reach, or if you feel stuck and are having a hard time gaining momentum, a life coach can be the catalyst for change that you need. Coaching focuses on your individual skills and abilities and will help you discover your own path to success. Is your life not worth investing in? We think it is.
Does more self-confidence, more meaningful relationships, enhanced work performance, or improved work-life balance sound appealing to you? Contact the FLOW Coaching Institute to learn about how you can focus on your strengths and uncover opportunities to build your life. You can have an excellent quality of life, you just might need to step out of your comfort zone to get it.
Both workplace coaching and mentoring are powerful tools to use in organisations. Businesses have been benefiting from coaching as well as mentoring for ages. There is a big confusion about what is mentoring and what is coaching. Most people think professional coaching and mentoringare the same thing, or at least similar. Yet there are differences between them. The biggest difference is here:
The coach does not have to be an expert in the subject in which they are coaching. As a matter of fact, they do not even need to have experience in the subject. However, a mentor must be experienced in the subject in which they are mentoring; they must have knowledge of and expertise in the subject.
In mentoring, frequency of the meetings can be informal. The meetings may as well be spontaneous as planned, the mentee can contact the mentor when needed.
More long-term. While it is employed in companies for the purposes of career development, knowledge, and experience transfer; in informal forms of mentoring, the mentor may approach the individual’s development in a more extensive manner.
The mentor needs to be more experienced and qualified than the mentee. Generally, individuals whose knowledge and experience transfer is seen as valuable come together with less experienced individuals in order to contribute to their growth.
In mentorship relationship, the mentor can give advice to the mentee. The mentor also teaches the mentee about the subject matter of the developmental need.
In Professional Coaching, the time period and number of meetings are specified from the beginning. The number of sessions usually start with 6 sessions and go up to 12 sessions. The frequency of the meetings is much more structured. There are regular intervals between the meetings such as a week, two weeks or once a month.
Professional Coaching relationship requires that the coach is able to manage the client’s progress and accountability. That is why the relationship has a certain period defined in the beginning of the relationship with specific focus on clear development goals.
It is not necessary for the coach to be a subject matter expert; this is a matter of preference.
In professional coaching relationship, the coach helps the coachee to obtain awareness and stretch themselves in order to maximize their potential. In order to provide that, the coach knows how to listen and ask powerful questions.
The reason why we feel a need to differentiate coaching as “professional coaching” is about the investment behind it. Professional coaches invest in their skill development and complete a certified coach training program through an accredited coaching school or institute. As coaching has been one of the most hype professions of the 21st century, professional coaches want to differentiate yourself from the crowd by investing in their coaching skills, confidence and competencies.
There are different types of specialty areas where professional coaches may focus on such as Life coaching; Executive Coaching; Career Coaching; Business Coaching; Workplace Coaching; Parenting Coaching; Youth Coaching; Team Coaching; Relationships Coaching… Whatever the specialty is, professional coaches work towards creating progress and positive change.
The FLOW Coaching Institute’s (FCI®) professional coach certification program was accredited by International Coach Federation in 2014. Creativity is the essence of FLOW Coach Method. At FLOW, we know that creativity opens up new thinking, new choices, new ways. FLOW Coaching certification training program is acknowledged as the most creative approach to professional coaching with a strong foundation rooted in ;
“What I like the most about FLOW’s online program is to see how invested and generous our program instructors have been. From their authenticity and guidance, you can tell that FLOW’s program instructors and mentors really want to see us succeed. When you complete the program you definitely feel like you are intested too.”- Tammy Douglas – Internal Talent Coach & Corporate Creativity Facilitator
Positive Psychology works. In the past, psychologists and researchers rarely considered or assessed positive emotions such as joy or happiness, except as a means of establishing the absence of depressiın or negative feelings. Research done by Professor Barbara Frederickson has shown us that when people are experiencing positive emotional states, they are more likely to view a challenge and its solutions more broadly-to be more creative and resourceful in their responses-and, as a result, to build up a greater capacity of social, emotional and mental perspectives from which they can benefit, even at times of stress and uncertainty.
Positive Psychology is interested in the science of well-being and happiness. It looks at what it takes to live a good life- a life that is really fulfilling and meaningful. After many years of research, Doctor Martin Seligman and Professor Mihaly Csziksentmihalyi came up with factors and acpects that contribute to a life that is worth of living:
Although Positive Psychology is based on soundest research principles, we believe that it shouldn’t be limited to the domain of academia. There is so much in it for everybody to learn and implement into our lives in order to achieve how to create a good life that is worth to live. Therefore, It is an important mission to Flow Coaching Institute to make these principles accessible to everybody through training, workshops, one on one coaching and corporate programs that we have been executing.
All of us worry or get scared sometimes. But if you feel extremely stressed or afraid much of the time, or if you repeatedly feel panicky, you may have an anxiety disorder. Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental illnesses, affecting millions of people each year. And yet, it does not have to be your destiny! There are effective treatment approaches, including cognitive behavioral therapies, psychotherapy, and medications. There are also integrative treatments to cope with anxiety, such as relaxation techniques, mindfulness meditation, and biofeedback.
Anxiety Symptoms
While symptoms vary widely, chances are good that at some point you’ve experienced occasional physical and emotional distress signals such as panicky breathing, your heart pounding in your chest, trouble sleeping, feelings of dread, or even loops of worry. By itself, anxiety isn’t a problem. It anchors the protective biological response to danger that boosts heartbeat and breathing, pumping oxygenated blood to your muscles as your body prepares to fight or flee. A healthy dose of anxiety can motivate you to get to work on time, move you to study well for an exam, or discourage you from walking alone in the unknown places at night.
Having anxiety is normal. The problem is that sometimes our anxiety responses get out of control, so that we overreact or react to the wrong situations, people or events.
Types of Anxiety Disorders
Source: Harvard Medical School
The results of anxiety
Quality of life suffers when the anxiety persists. Intrusive thoughts, panic attacks, intense self-consciousness and fear of rejection, and other results of anxiety disorders compel people to avoid anxiety-provoking situations. This interferes with relationships, work, school, and activities as people isolate themselves, turn down opportunities, and undermine our joys of life.
There are effective interventions for anxiety
Often, a combination of these approaches is most effective. For example while having CBT, art therapy and/or exposure therapy it is effective to cultivate and strengthen coping skills to retain anxiety manageable such as learning to do yoga, meditation or beginning to paint, etc.
People are tricky beings and leading them isn't an easy job, but some leaders make it harder on themselves by ignoring a few simple principles of emotional intelligence.
You don't need to be an expert, or focus an extraordinary amount of effort towards emotional intelligence (also referred to as EQ) for you and your team to experience the benefits. By following a few basic principles, you can improve your emotional intelligence, and as a result, improve many things, from employee experience to organizational performance.
Business knowledge, technical skills, being result oriented and experience are important for nearly any business position, but they're not the only ones. As in his Emotional Intelligence book Daniel Goleman states: "It’s not that IQ and technical skills are irrelevant. They do matter, but…they are the entry-level requirements for executive positions."
So, what else these managers need to learn and improve to transform themselves into leaders with people skills?
1. Self-awareness
Self-awareness is about being honest and having a transparent relationship with the self. It is described as "the ability to recognize and understand personal moods and emotions and drives, as well as their effect on others." It is the foundation of becoming an authentic leader.
2. Self-regulation
Self regulation is our ability to manage and regulate our emotions. It prevents us from having ups and downs and regulate our mood. It also helps us to identify self goals and have inner discipline to take action towards achieving them. It is about valuing our own accountability without needing others to hold us accountable.
3. Internal drive
Internal drive can be described as "having an apetite for work that goes beyond money and status."
Leaders with strong emotional intelligence understand their internal motivations, and how those motivations correlate with their values as well as those of their team and the organization.
A leader with a drive knows how to energize people and usually their people are inspired by them. These internally fueled leaders are also resilient. They are marathon runners and they do not quit until they reach their target.
4. Empathy and communication skills
Empathy is the ability for someone to understand and the feelings of another person and have compassion about them. It's a key ingredient of trust and building fulfilling relationships.
Leaders without empathy, carry a high risk of being perceived as abrasive and toxic as they are ignorant of the emotional impact of their actions and decisions.
An empathetic leader however has a capacity to assess how their vision and decisions will be perceived and they communicate well to prevent future damage. They know how to relate their employees and visa versa.
It is no surprise that professional coaching has been one of the fastest growing occupations around the world in 21stcentury. How does one become a professional coach?
Going through a certified coach training program is the first step of becoming a coach. Not any program, but a program that has an accreditation from a legitimate organization such as the International Coach Federation. The International Coach Federation (ICF) is the most internationally renowned accreditation organization across the world. The International Coach Federation has different tracks that lead to certified coach credentialing:
ACC/ACSTH track can be considered as the entry level to becoming a credentialed coach through ICF. Whereas the ACTP Professional coaching accredition path can be considered as the gold standard in the world of coach certification training. The FLOW Coaching Institute’s coaching certification programsa have both ACC/ACSTH and ACTP accreditations. FLOW’s short track online ACC/ACSTH program provides Professional coach education with individual mentoring sessions to prepare our student coaches for their future coaching career. FLOW’s ACTP coaching accreditation program has everything that you would need to become a successful Professional coach and be able to coach holistically.
So, if you are looking for an online coaching certification program, make sure that the program has at least one of these logos: ACSTH or ACTP .
Flow Coaching Institute is mainly based on the science of positive psychology and the Flow Model. When we first started Flow Coaching Institute we wanted to make sure that everything that we taught was backed by science and is something tangible that makes sense to not just our students but their potential clients as well.
The science of positive psychology is something we practiced on our own before we even started Flow Coaching Institute. We know for a fact that using the principles of positive psychology will greatly allow you to recognize your full potential in all areas of your life. The fact that it is rooted in positivity will transform you into a much happier person by the end of it.
Positive psychology was introduced in 1998 by the founder’s Dr. Martin Selgiman and Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. There has been a lot of back and forth going around in describing just what Positive Psychology is and the best way to explain it as well as the most commonly accepted definition is:
“Positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life most worth living” (Peterson, 2008).
This means that it is a scientific approach to studying human thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. And we also then focus on their strengths instead of their weaknesses. To build good things in life rather than “fixing” the bad. The main focuses of positive psychology are centered around positive experiences, traits, and also positive thoughts and mindsets. Things like self-esteem, confidence, hope, gratitude, and compassion are all main ideas of positive psychology.
The foundational study surrounding positive psychology was published in 2000 with Dr. Martin Seligman and the “founding father” of flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It is seen that after this, there has been a much bigger calling surrounding the focus on positivity in life.
When it came to merging the science of positive psychology and the Flow Methodology, we decided to focus on three main pillars. They are:
All ICF Certified coaching programs that are offered in Flow Coaching Insititute instill these three pillars of positive psychology. Which allows all our graduates to go forth into the world to spread happiness.
It also allows these coaches to show their clients the positivity of their futures and to also accept and see their past as a resource to then create their desired reality with grounded optimism.
These pillars are the backbone of all our programs here at Flow Coaching Institute and it has been the main reason why so many students from Flow flourish once they graduate.
Focusing on the good things in life is a given, but with the Flow model, we have structured it in a way that it becomes a grounding exercise. We accept our past, we learn from it and we apply the things we learn from it to better our future.
We have often said that the science of positive psychology isn’t that hard to understand, it’s not rocket science, but it is a science regardless. However, implementing it isn’t that hard and can be done by anyone after they have fully understood what it stands for and how we can use it to transform lives.
Creating a happier life is in no one else’s hands but yours, so how do you implement these pillars to create a happier life for yourself? Or rather how do our coaches go ahead and coach their clients with this methodology and see amazing results? Well, the focus mainly on:
We hope that this article has given you a quick and fun insight into what the science of positive psychology is and which parts of that are used in Flow Coaching Institute and that are taught to our amazing students.
Let us know what your thoughts are on the science of positive psychology? We would love to hear from you.