Personal & Life Coaching
Quite simply, personal or life coaching helps you to identify and achieve your personal goals and ambitions. It’s a future focused activity which helps you to be more of the person you want to be, living more of the life you want to live. It’s an investment in your future.
Your goals may be broad or very specific. You may want to make major changes in your personal or work life, or you may simply wish to be more effective in one particular area. Either way, coaching can be an effective way of supporting you in getting you from where you are now to where you want to be.
Your goals may be connected to your work and performance, your personal life and relationships, your sense of purpose, fulfilment or wellbeing. Coaching can help in all these areas.
Common Questions
Coaching can be helpful in almost any area of life where you feel there’s a gap between where you are now and where you’d like to be. If that gap can be met by developing a new skill or a fresh way of thinking about things then coaching can help. Rather than provide an exhaustive list of the areas where coaching can be applied, here are some common issues that coaching clients often come with:
- How can I manage my time better to achieve more of what I want from life?
- I want to learn to be more assertive and less worried about conflict.
- How can I learn to be less overwhelmed by the stresses of my job and life?
- I want to work out how I can achieve a better work/life balance
- How can I manage to get my own needs met in relationships?
- What can I do to build a life and career that’s more fulfilling?
- How can I improve my relationship with my partner?
While this type of coaching is often called life or personal coaching it can also help with concerns that are work related. What matters most is that we develop a shared understanding of where you want to get to and the best way there, and that I am able to provide a supportive and motivating environment within which you can achieve what you want.
Coaching begins with a conversation between us about what has brought you to coaching, what you’re looking for, and how we might work together.
I see coaching as a process we both contribute to, although we bring different things to it. My role is to provide a framework where you can develop clarity about your goals and what you need to achieve them, and support you in the process of developing the necessary strengths and skills. Your role is to take those developing strengths and skills into your wider world and begin to apply them.
That may feel like hard work at times and a little scary, but if it were easy you’d have done it already. I'll provide an environment for you that is supportive and motivating, and within which it’s acknowledged that it may not always go exactly as planned.
Our initial discussion is free of charge. If we agree to work together after that my sessional fees for coaching (per 60 minute session) are £70.
I can accept by bank transfer and Pay Pal.
Future basing for individuals, couples and organisations
Achievements great or small, from building the life you want, to putting someone on the moon, start with a vision.
Future Basing is a powerful and creative way of building a compelling vision of your desired future and starting the journey towards it. It can be applied equally well in planning your own personal future, to shaping the future of organisations both large and small.
Future Basing turns traditional approaches to planning through 180 degrees. It assumes that we already have an image, however incomplete, of the future that we want to create. The Future Basing approach begins with developing this picture into a comprehensive and compelling vision. Rather than starting from now and attempting to look into the future, it steps into that future and assumes that it has already been created, then works back to find out precisely how.
Common Questions
Most approaches to life planning and goal setting start from where we are now, and help us to look into the future and see how we want it to be different. From there we work on how to get there. Using this approach the journey is more likely to look like a very long flight of stairs we’re going to have to climb to get to the top. There are a lot of obstacles in the way.
Future Basing starts from the top of the stairs. It assumes that our desired future has already come about, and invites us to spend some time in exploring and describing it in detail, as well as how it feels to have arrived there. On the basis that it has already happened, we then map out in detail the steps that took us there.
In contrast to more traditional ways of life planning and goal setting, it’s not hard to see how creative, freeing and energising the process can be. Having used it myself, and with many of my clients, I can vouch for how powerful it can be.
Future-Basing engages our creative imagination, and helps to connect our vision with the most fundamental things that motivate us: our values, desires, and sense of purpose. There is clear evidence of a link between these types of goals, the effort that we put into their achievement, and our likelihood of attaining them. There is also evidence that the achievement of goals which are based on these core values enhances our personal wellbeing: achieving them makes us happier.
This is part of what makes Future Basing so powerful.
Feedback from previous clients
….. I was suddenly able to see very clearly where I wanted to be in a specific future, set the evident goals and detect the blocks in the present. By identifying distinct milestones for that future to happen, it became obvious how feasible that reality was
Today, a few months later, I am still amazed how much my life has changed for the better. My future is now and (mostly) everything is on track. In just a few sessions, I have acquired a powerful tool for life
……I found it really useful, effective and immediately engaging. It helped to solidify a vision
…..It’s overwhelming value is envisioning a different and better future
The Future Basing process involves four key stages.
In Stage 1 we identify a date for your future base. This is the point in the future where the future that you want has come to pass and is a reality.
Stage 2 involves exploring and describing in detail the world of your future base and the elements that comprise it. We do this in the present tense, as if it has already happened. The elements of your future base are yours to decide, but for most people they tend to be wide ranging and include work, work-life balance, income and finance, family and relationships, leisure and creativity, and so on. It’s for you to decide what that world now looks like. This exploration includes not just what it looks like, but what it means to you and how it feels to have achieved it. Both are critically important in providing future motivation.
At stage 3 we identify the precise steps that you took in creating this future. From this process will emerge a very detailed map of the actions and milestones that connect it to that point in the past when you created your future base.
Stage 4 involves a review of your future base and timeline, committing to the journey and identifying what you are already doing and the immediate next steps on that journey.
For individuals the process usually takes somewhere around five hours, for couples and organisations, a little longer may be required.
That’s a good question. While just about everyone has heard of coaching, strategic planning and goal setting, Future Basing often feels like a well kept secret. Maybe this is partly because the title doesn’t offer to many clues as to what it actually is. Try searching for ‘planning my life’ or ‘goal setting’ or ‘strategic planning’ on the internet and you won’t find Future Basing on the first search page. That’s a shame.
Future Basing was originally developed by Bill Phillips (with whom I trained in 2012). Bill is a is a certified International NLP Coach, an accomplished and experienced Team Coach and International Facilitator, and a Management Consultant. It can be used as a goal setting and life planning process with individuals and couples, as well as a means of vision building and strategic planning by organisations. You can also find out more details, including a range of organisational case studies, on the Future Basing website.
Hi, I'm Barry
I’ve been a therapist and coach for more than 30 years, as well as a therapy service manager. As a kid I was always taking things apart to see how they worked, and I have the same curiosity about what makes therapy work. Everything I’ve learned along the way I bring to my work now, and I also share in a blog with a professional audience. I’m as passionate now, about the power of therapy and coaching to transform lives, as I was when I started.
I live and work between the UK and Spain. With online and telephone therapy where my chair is really isn’t relevant. As many hundreds of clients who I’ve worked with over the years also know, where they are isn’t really relevant either.
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