Helen Jones

What is your approach?

My Executive coaching style is towards the non-directive end of the spectrum. If you haven’t experienced coaching this might feel a little odd as sessions are not conversational but rather consist of me asking questions that will help you think differently to bring new insights about the goals, you want to reach.

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Silence can be helpful in coaching and my intention will be not to interrupt when you might be thinking. In some coaching techniques the coach with your agreement might be silent throughout the session. This will probably feel unusual but can be valuable in allowing you to reach your own conclusions and do your very best thinking. We will decide how we will work with silence when we contract.

 

How will it work?

We will contract for each session at the start. By this I mean we will agree things such as how much challenge you want in the session, and I will encourage you to consider being challenged to gain the greatest insights and transformation. We all have different tolerances for this level of challenge at different times and it is important we discuss in our contracting what works for you based on how you are feeling on that day. I will also leave 10 minutes at the end of each session for review. This is an opportunity for you to collect your thoughts and to feed back to me what you found helpful or less helpful in the session, so that we can continue to improve the way we work together.

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What is your approach to mentoring?

Whilst my focus is on offering Executive coaching, if there is an occasion in which for instance you want to ask me a direct question about my Executive experience or anything else from more of a mentoring perspective, I might suggest we make some space for that at the end, so as not to distract from the benefits of the coaching process. When discussing something you don’t need to give me all your context. I can coach without this and therefore will rarely ask for additional information other than what you provide to me. It is entirely up to you what you share. From my perspective you only need to share the context you feel you need to share for your best thinking. Make the best use of your time to think differently rather than just give me content.

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What sort of questions will you ask me in coaching?

Some coaching questions might seem really odd, they might make you laugh or they might make you cross. Sometimes people have fed back to me that the questions make them feel really challenged as they don’t immediately know how to answer them. All these responses are normal. In my experience the more difficult a question is to answer, the more it makes you think and has the potential to produce new and different thinking.

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You can be assured that my coaching will always come from a place of compassion and appreciation of you and with your agreement I will share my appreciation of you at the end of every session.

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How much do coaching sessions cost?

For organisations, my standard fee is £200 for an Executive Coaching session lasting 1.5 hours which my research tells me is at the lower end of the going rate. This rate takes account of preparation and follow-up time as well as the cost of supervision and on-going training for my continuous professional development.

If your organisation is not able to pay that fee because of the current financial climate or because it is a small organisation or charity for instance, I am very happy to have a conversation with you about what rate would be acceptable, so please do not be embarrassed about getting in touch to ask.

 

Similarly, given the financial challenges in some public sector organisations, I am also appreciative of the fact that some are not paying for Executive coaching. If your only option is to self-fund, I am happy to offer fees at less than half of my standard rate so again, please do get in touch. What’s important to me, having seen the benefits that coaching can bring is that people in the public sector can access it.

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Similarly rates for solopreneurs (people running their own businesses) will be adjusted for affordability.

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