• Coaching is an iterative, targeted, interactive process designed to facilitate concrete changes in performance—and bottom-line results. At ACWLC, we help clients achieve their goals through powerful conversations that are intended to inspire new thinking, perceptions, and behavior that actualize your potential, improve your performance, create focus and directional clarity, support the achievement of your personal and professional goals, and enhance the quality of your life.
  
• Investing in yourself is actively working towards your personal growth and well-being. This could mean learning new things, honing your skills, or just making sure you're mentally and physically healthy. It's about setting goals that matter to you and really going for them.
  
• When clients are working toward goals that mean something to them, it increases their confidence, and the more a client feels better about themselves, the more confidence they will have to progress through life in a positive and meaningful way. Investing in yourself demonstrates that you think you are worth it and that you have value in your life.

Before we talk about our approach to coaching, we would like to talk about how our coaches approach you, the client.

• We believe that you are the expert in your life.
• We believe that you are whole, not broken.
• We believe that you are resourceful and capable of far more than you imagine.We believe in your capacity to change.

Our approach to coaching is an emergent, iterative, holistic process designed to elicit powerful conversations. These conversations are intended to inspire new thinking, perceptions, and behavior to improve performance, create directional clarity, achieve personal and professional goals, and enhance the quality of your life.

The objective is to focus on your potential (your unrealized ability, capacity, or possibility) by leveraging your strengths, uncovering what’s in your way, and targeting the areas you are most interested in addressing to help you reach your professional and/or personal goals more effectively.

• Executive coaching empowers you. To become a great leader, one must continuously learn, grow, and develop their leadership skills. Business and life can create challenges and obstacles that necessitate complex, dynamic, and positive changes. Executive coaches provide built-in support and accountability along with strategies for success that empower you to reach your goals!
• Many individuals reach a point in their lives where they feel lost or uncertain about their goals and direction. They may be dissatisfied with their current path, struggling to identify their life's purpose, or feeling over whelmed by choices. Life coaches provide a structured process to help clients gain clarity. Clarity and Direction: Individuals may feel lost or unsure about their life's path. They go to a life coach for help in gaining clarity, setting priorities, and making decisions. Self-Discovery: People often seek to better understand themselves, their values, strengths, and weaknesses.

The differences between coaching and psychotherapy are:

• Coaches focus on the future. Therapists focus on the past.
• Coaches center their work around the belief that clients are healthy. Therapists utilize a framework that is based on pathology and illness.
• Coaches work with the conscious mind. Therapists work with the unconscious mind.
• Coaches’ work is often time-limited with specific desired behavioral outcomes. Therapists’ work is open-ended with “understanding” as the primary objective.
• Coaches work in person, as well as over the phone. Therapist susually work in person only.

There are similarities between coaching and psychotherapy as well. They are:

• Both are concerned with making concrete changes in youremotional state and life.
  
• Both works to understand the self-limiting beliefs or behavior caused by thoughts and emotions that you may or may not be aware of.
• Both practices help you grow, change, and master your emotions.

• We’ve seen many clients change in powerful ways. And they’ve likely had ambitions, goals, concerns, and challenges that are like yours. Coaching can be the catalyst to profoundly shift the trajectory of your life, enabling you to change the quality of your life and the direction of your career in ways you never dreamed of. Therefore, it is paramount that you look for someone who resonates with you and your needs by asking your goals and what challenges you are facing.
• All “Our Coaches” have their “Areas of Expertise” listed on their biographies. Although there are exceptions to the rules, our coaches do not normally venture out from the services they provide.

What happens in our sessions stays in our sessions. We fully understand the value of your trust, and we take every precaution to safeguard it. We will provide you with a detailed description of the ethical code that governs every client-coach relationship we enter. This document not only places our standards before you in plain text, but also codifies our commitment to you, the client, and your progress.

We meet with clients once a week. Through many years of experience and testing of different time frames, we’ve found that this frequency yields the greatest returns in terms of change. Meeting once a week offers time for reflection and application of learning between sessions, while maintaining the momentum of our work together.

To make coaching as convenient as possible for our clients, we offer several options. Coaching services can be conducted on-site for corporate engagements, via video (our secure platform known as Vagaro) for remote clients and busy executives, and via zoom for group coaching activities.

• The time frame can vary greatly and depends on a wide range of factors: your goal(s), your commitment and openness to change, your capacity for introspection, your circumstances, how quickly and thoughtfully you complete homework assignments, and other unique factors.
• We have individuals who come in for a very brief engagement (e.g., one mock interview coaching session). We have others who come in focused on one goal, achieve that goal, and begin work on another goal and then another. 
  
• Those individuals who partner with us in multiple capacities and for multiple goals work with us for a year or more.

• We start each coaching engagement with a comprehensive interview and, occasionally, a perceptual lens assessment. This allows us to develop a deep understanding of you, your life stories, and your underlying operating system in a short period of time. Armed with this knowledge, we then begin to help you think about your situation and your life in new ways.
  
• We ask powerful questions, we assign individualized homework, we utilize proprietary exercises and processes, and we often evaluate individualized metrics to help you tap into your unique potential. Our process is invigorating; you will begin to find clarity, change your mood states, and take powerful new actions in multiple areas of your life.

The foundation of our coaching incorporates these primary styles:

• Transformation-oriented: Although change in individuals is often measured on a behavioral basis, real change happens below the surface on a deeper level. Cultivating self-awareness, recalibrating your observational perspectives, and promoting paradigm shifts can yield huge personal and professional dividends and deep change. When systemic change occurs, it allows for adaptive, not technical application. That, in turn, allows for more masterful navigation of the complexities of your relationships, career and life.
• Results-oriented: While all our ACWLC coaches understand that it is process that will get us to the result, we are not attached to a particular tool, technique or approach. This means that if something isn’t working, we will quickly apply a new strategy or approach. Our primary style is emergent, iterative and results oriented. Very pragmatic, targeted strategies and tools are often used to promote more effective action to achieve goals more quickly.
• Direct: Honest, crucial conversations, when appropriate, are met head-on without reservation.
• Holistic: Currently, we live in a world that encourages specialization, reductionism, and separation. While we may focus our work in a very targeted way, our coaching approach and lens is holistic, integrative, and systemic. We know that a change you make in one area often influences and impacts another. We understand that once the underpinnings of a particular challenge are unearthed and effectively dealt with, it can have a domino effect, positively impacting many areas of your life. Then, the result is real, lasting change, not a superficial Band-Aid fix.

• The methodologies that are used are based on what best fits the client and which coach the client has. Our goal is to make sure you have the coaching that allows you to envision and achieve the happiness Your Future Self desires. With that said, all our methodologies are listed below, however, they are 100% dependent upon the client, the type of coaching, the specific coach, and the goal that is being achieved. In addition, our coaching sessions are not model focused meaning that depending on what the client has set themselves to achieve depends on which model or models will be utilized during that session.

• The foundation of our coaching incorporates these methodologies:

  • Ontological and Systemic Change Approach: A dynamic, transformative coaching model that systemically addresses how you relate to the world through your language, moods and emotions, mental models, physiology, and observational lens. Ontological coaching is often a catalyst for paradigm shifts. It is a bedrock model of coaching that addresses where real change happens below the surface. In fact, behavioral change accounts for only 10% of your overall performance and results.
  • Cognitive Behavioral Coaching: This approach develops an awareness of the habitually recurring thinking patterns that create your mood states and reactions to events, circumstances, and others. As negative thought patterns and moods can be personally and interpersonally destructive, we coach you to transmute destructive thoughts to minimize the impact on your performance, mood and results.
  • Mindfulness: This is a process of creating sustained awareness and focus in the moment to override reactive emotional tendencies and begin to change habitual neurotransmitter patterns.
  • “Competing Commitment to Change” Model: While individuals can change and can be taught to change, they often don’t change or resist change. The root cause is often a competing commitment outside their conscious awareness. The Kegan and Lahey model is a four-step process that exposes an individual’s hidden commitments that conflict with their conscious goal.
  • “Get Coached” Model: This one tool is what you need to change anything in your life by helping you understand how your circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results work.
  • “Solution-Focused” Model: The method of empowering individuals to achieve their goals through goal-oriented techniques. It works by evaluating an individual's current situation and then addressing how best to leverage their existing strengths, resources, and capabilities.
  • “GROW” Model: The most popular executive coaching approaches used by the best coaches in the industry. This coaching technique was originally developed and popularized by Sir John Whitmore, Alan Fine, and Graham Alexander in 1992; to help people not only find solutions to their problems, but also understand their situations and explore their options, while at the same time boosts their confidence and self-motivation.
  • “OSKAR” Model: The popular coaching model that allows you to focus on solutions to problems rather than on the problems themselves. Helping individuals identify and overcome obstacles, create actionable goals, and make lasting changes in their lives. It is a client-centered approach that focuses on the unique needs and aspirations of each individual.
  • “CLEAR” Model: Facilitates effective goal setting by helping clients articulate their aspirations explicitly, letting them have a clear vision of what they want to accomplish. Delivered in a highly conversational way, through a series of questions, and often used in executive and leadership coaching. As the name implies, it encourages clients to get “clear” on what they want.
  • “AOR” Model: This model emphasizes the importance of taking action to create change, a safe environment for honest conversations, and help individuals gain clarity on their goals, intentions, and necessary steps to reach those objectives. It's an effective tool that can have lasting results as there is a focus on the relationship between the coach and client, as this is seen as key to creating successful coaching interaction.
  • “FUEL” Model: Meticulously designed to foster active participation and ownership from the client. Consisting of four essential steps which allow the client to assess the situation, determine their own solution, and take ownership and accountability for the outcome.
  • “WOOP” Model: This model can be used to help people identify their goals, identify the obstacles that are preventing them from achieving those goals, and develop a plan to overcome those obstacles. WOOP is based on the premise that we are more likely to achieve, and if we have a plan in place to overcome any obstacles that might stand in our way. This model can be used for any goal, large or small. It is the simple yet effective way to help us achieve our goals and live our best lives.
  • “STEPPA” Model: A management approach that helps individuals and teams achieve their goals through structured conversations. It involves identifying the current situation, exploring options, creating an action plan, and reviewing progress regularly. 
  • “Action-Centered Leadership” Model: A simple model that can help clients keep the three key areas of responsibility – task, team and individual – in balance. Adair's concept asserts that the three needs are the watchwords of leadership, as people expect their leaders to help them achieve the common task, build the synergy of teamwork, and respond to individuals' needs. The model is applied in three stages to develop the core skills necessary for the client’s level of leadership. 

You may choose to terminate work at any time, although it is helpful for your coach to have a week’s notice to prepare a final session that focuses on review and closure. Ultimately, that decision is up to you.

• There are no federal or state-mandated educational or licensing requirements to become an Executive and/or Life Coach, but there is consensus in the industry on education and training: Completing a coach certificate program is highly recommended to be a successful coach and demonstrate your expertise to potential clients.
• ACWLC does not and will not employee any coaches that are not certified. Because there is not a governing body, we do require our coaches to maintain at least 40 hours of continuing education annually.

• ACWLC does offer coaching certification programs. Our program is self-paced, online, and through Affirm Coaching University. Contact: Please call our office 833.Launch-U and/or email us (Subject: Affirm Coaching University) at Coaching@affirmlifecoaching.com.
• We have specific curriculum tailored toward each individual certification. The curriculum is comprehensive and structured to be completed within 6 months. 

• We do plan on adding more coaching certifications, however, we are currently offering the following:

  • Life Coach: A Life Coach helps their clients achieve their personal goals.
  • Executive Coach: An Executive Coach helps their clients achieve their professional goals.
  • Leadership Coach: A Leadership Coach helps their clients achieve their personal and professional goals relating to leadership.
  • Happiness Coach: A Happiness Coach helps their clients achieve happiness in all aspects of their life.
  • Goal Coach: A Goal Coach helps their clients achieve a specific goal which can be personal and/or professional.
  • Children/Teen Coach: A Children/Teen Coach helps their clients achieve personal goals that are set by the needs of the individual and the parents.
  • Grief Coach: A Grief Coach helps their clients navigate positively through each of the stages of grief.
  • Confidence Coach: A Confidence Coach helps their clients build the confidence they need to obtain their goals both professionally and personally.
  • Entrepreneur Coach: An Entrepreneur Coach helps their clients with their professional development and desires to start, maintain, and excel in all businesses the client currently owns and wants to begin.
  • Master Coach: A Master Coach is a coach that has been certified in all our coaching programs at the time of their certifications.
• If you are newly certified and would like to join our team, please check out our careers section and apply.