I’m sharing with you my answer to an email I received from one of the potential students to the coaching course we are opening soon.

I thought that it’s a very good one, and I’m sharing here exactly what I answered her.

She wrote:

“I’ve one last question before I decide to take the course: How you would support the student to study on and between each study day?”

(I bet you’re curious to know if she enrolled or not…
Well… you’ll have to read all the way to the end.)

And I answered:

Dear X,

Thank you for this very important question. I like it very much.

In phase 1 we indeed concentrate on (life) coaching skills (you’re right that some of them are very similar to counselling skills).

The way we work, is that on top of short discussions about theory (which you mainly prepare to at home), we put the emphasis during the training days on practising the different tools, skills, methods and modules of coaching. Most of the training days will be dedicated to learning those and practising them with the other students, while receiving constructive and supporting feedback from the other students (we’ll work on this together) and of course the trainers.
On the course, we have 3 members of staff working with the students (2 trainers and an assistant, by all means a very good ratio for such small groups as we run, of 15-18 students).
This assures that we’re always present, we’re always there to observe, support, show the way to improve and each and every one of you gets to have us involved with their learning and progress during the training days.

As for in between the training days:
If you noticed, we have at least 5 online lessons on the course. These are usually dedicated to students questions and we provide the answers. If there aren’t any questions we give a session about a topic which is important to some/most students.
If there’s a need to it, we can add more of these sessions.

We also have a closed and secret Facebook group. In this group students share dilemmas, raise questions, share knowledge and open active discussions.
The trainers are of course part of it, and depending on the course and the students of course, this can become a very active and full of support group.
If we see that there’s a rushing matter, or we feel that there’s anything which needs to be addressed, we can also use the Facebook group as a platform for sending you links and information between the training days.

On top of this, we run a WhatsApp group for announcements but also for any urgent matters.
For example, in the past one of our students was about to start her first session with a client and she felt as if she is forgetting everything that you needed to do. She had a blackout and started panicking. So she posted on the WhatsApp group and we all helped her by reminding her what she had to do and relaxing her. This was simply beautiful, and I was so impressed by the power of the group which we enabled to happen thanks to the fact that we run such groups, and thanks to the atmosphere on our courses (I remind you that we really choose our students, interviewing every single one of you, and this ensures the quality of the people coming).

But the study and growth does not happen on the training days alone.
Students have to have 25 hours of Peer Group Study during phase 1.
This happens in between the study days and the whole idea of those is to practice and drill in the things that we talk about during the training days. You receive a list of suggested things to talk about or to exercise. As a student, you need to log this as part of your progress and we monitor this log together with you during different times during the course.

Last, but certainly not least, we proud ourselves on being very attentive and supporting of our students.
We have an open door policy and everyone can ask to speak to one of the trainers personally.
Students can always talk to us before, during and after training days.
Students are always welcomed to contact us every week during our office hours or set a time to talk outside of office hours if needed.
This way we support you as individuals as well as a group.

I hope this is answering your question. Please keep asking in case there’s anything else you’d like to know the answer to. I’m here exactly for this.

Yours,
Noa

****************************

Nearly 24 hours passed before I received the answer, but then it arrived:

She wrote:
I would like to join you in your upcoming academic years. Please send me the registration form and the first invoice. I would like to register the 2 phases of the course together.

We’re so happy to have you and your calm energies X, and can’t wait to see you growing your skills.