Success Discoveries offers expertise in building better relationships, personal branding and resume writing, job search, interviewing, personal life satisfaction issues and more. We offer state-of-the-art assessments that address the full range of human interaction from behavioral style, personal motivation, soft skills, communication preferences, emotional intelligence, cognitive acumen, workplace stress and much more.

Depending on your needs and focus, these program offerings are designed to create a shift in your work or life, or empower you to take yourself to the next level. Whether you choose to take a self-directed approach or engage a professional coach, we'll help you choose the best offering to fit your needs.

Coaching is a powerful process that helps people deliver success in their personal and professional lives. Through the process of coaching, Success Discoveries clients deepen their learning, improve their performance and enhance their quality of life faster than what they would experience on their own. This coaching relationship helps give clarity to the situation, create a solution and helps define the change to be made.

Ultimately coaching accelerates the clients' progress by providing greater focus and awareness of choices they need to make. Through collaborative teaming, joint strategies, and a collective vision, Success Discoveries coaches broaden and expand beyond individual capabilities to ensure that our clients receive comprehensive strategies, tools, and knowledge that enables them to move into their greatest personal and professional potential.

We come together to promote and deliver the full power of coaching to our clients - coaching programs customized to each client's individual needs. We deliver world-class coaching to an ever-widening population of individual and institutional clients who will experience prosperity and growth through coaching.

Our form of coaching will be viewed as a necessity rather than as a luxury. Our localized collaborative will be replicated in multiple geographies, thereby expanding human potential and social progress globally.

Interdependence

There can be no friendship without confidence, and no confidence without integrity. Samuel Jackson

The members of Success Discoveries recognize the power and synergy of its interdependent nature. Valuing differences is the essence of synergy. The key to valuing those differences between people is to realize that all people see the world, not as it is, but as they are. The person who is truly effective has the humility and reverence to recognize his own perceptual limitations and to appreciate the rich resources available through interaction with the hearts and minds of other human beings. That person values the differences because those differences add to his knowledge, to his understanding of reality. When we’re left to our own experiences, we constantly suffer from a shortage of data.

Collaboration

To work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort. The American Heritage Dictionary

By working together to deliver services, the members of the Success Discoveries consortium reduce the risk of professional isolation and ultimately provide a better service to their clients.

We not only work collaboratively with our fellow coaches, we also provide a collaborative coaching model for our clients. Collaborative coaching is a supportive, practical and structured process by which the coach and the client work together to jointly chart a course to deliver the objectives.

Collaborative Coaching helps the client and the coach be more aware of the process they are following and take joint responsibility for a successful outcome. So the client is not being ‘coached’ by the coach. Rather, it is a shared journey they both experience and take responsibility for.

With this shared process the client chooses the focus of conversation and content, while the coach provides a guiding framework they jointly use. In many ways the coach is verbalizing or making conscious the inner voice that we all have but often choose to ignore. Collaborative Coaching seeks to offer a supportive, practical and structured process by which the coach and the client work together to jointly chart a course to deliver the objectives.

Esteem & Respect for Clients and Each Other

Each of us has gifts and talents that must be acknowledged. By recognizing and appreciating each other, we become more effective individually and together. Clients experience a level of respect that gives them the confidence to explore and move to a new level in their lives.

Service

Success Discoveries is a professional service organization. We recognize the individual client as our end-customer and respond to their needs in an act of service. We work closely with our corporate clients to ensure our services are meeting their needs. We aim to exceed expectations at all times.

Openness to Learn From Clients and Each Other

We believe the ability to grow professionally and to ensure we are providing the very best coaching, coaching tools and technology requires an openness to learn from every interaction. We actively seek out knowledge in preparation for future challenges. Our coaching methods are constantly under scrutiny so that we may make course corrections and maintain the highest reputation for providing the broadest, strongest and most competent array of coaches and coaching technologies available.

Our Differentiating Principles

“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

When clients engage with us at any stage, they get far more than any one coach can provide - they own our collective talents and wisdom. We draw on the wealth of knowledge of each other and share our expertise freely for the benefit of the client.

You will need to learn how to operate autonomously, taking sole responsibility for running every aspect of your coaching practice. You will also need to learn new skills and acquire fresh perspectives on your areas of interest on a regular basis. Above all you will need to place your clients at the centre of what you do, how you do it and why you do what you do. Coaching will motivate you, inspire you, frustrate you and, at times, drain you. It might also be the most rewarding role you’ve ever had.

At the end of the day, as an independent coach, you are the only person who can get your business off the ground and keep it busy and productive with top quality services for your clients. To become and remain a consistently effective coach will require resolve, perseverance, flexibility and a degree of luck on your part.

Starting and Running Your Coaching Practice
So what are the key issues that you are likely to face as an independent coach? In order to start and run your coaching practice successfully you will need to:

Sell and market yourself effectively: Many of you have a lot of passion for your subject but find selling yourself and your coaching services challenging. You may not have sold yourself before becoming a coach. You may struggle to find the words or phrases you need to convey your coaching offer in sales situations. You may simply not know how to put yourself across consistently well, and hope instead that your credentials and qualifications alone will be enough to influence potential clients to work with you. Sadly, they rarely are, although they will sometimes get you a hearing. As an independent coach you need to become proficient at selling and marketing yourself pretty fast if you are to survive and thrive. You will need to learn to locate potential clients and outline what you can do for each of them in detail. Your coaching offer must convince them that you are the coach they need to work with.

Own up to being the sole decision-maker and problem-solver: As an independent coach you are primarily responsible for making all the decisions that need to be made in your business, and for identifying and solving all the problems that crop up as well. Performing these two essential functions well is critical to the success of your coaching practice. As the sole member of your own workforce you won’t have ready-made colleagues against whom to bounce ideas and discuss possible ways forward. You might find the isolation quite disabling, especially if you used to work as part of a team. You need to learn to handle the isolation and perform these two key functions if you are to make headway with the issues facing you and your coaching practice.

Manage your own on-going professional development: Your clients look to you as their coach to make a contribution to their continuing learning needs. But you also need to look after your own on-going professional development. Amid so many competing demands on your time, you may struggle to prioritise your own learning and keep these commitments as scrupulously as you would a commitment to a client. Nonetheless it’s difficult to offer a fresh and incisive service to clients if you aren’t being refreshed yourself. You need to make your own on-going professional development a key part of your regular business cycle and plan to attend – and, where possible, initiate – development opportunities for yourself that will keep your coaching stimulating and effective for your clients and interesting for you.

Maintain effective boundaries when working from home: Many of you will elect to work from home and that has many benefits. It can save you the time and expense of commuting. You can claim back a legitimate proportion of your household running costs as business expenses. You can avoid charges for renting or buying office space. But working from home also brings inherent boundaries issues with it: how do you differentiate between work time and personal time when working from home? How do you preserve evenings and weekends for non-work activities? How do you resist the temptation to download emails or sneak into the office for an hour or two after your evening meal? How do you “go to work” at home? Solving these issues is vital if you are to enjoy the work-life balance you’d like to have and to leave work behind when it’s time to do so.

Starting and running a coaching business can be extremely rewarding. If you watch out for these common challenges and find the support and resources that will help you address them, you will be well on your way to a thriving practice.

Aryanne Oade is a Chartered Psychologist and the owner of an established and successful coaching practice who works with clients across the UK, Europe and North America. She is the author of Starting and Running a Coaching Business, a toolkit for newly qualified and established coaches, which addresses the most common issues facing independent coaches. For more information, please visit http://www.oadeassociates.com.