Art as Inspiration

Finding a way to express yourself is probably one of the most fulfilling ways to reduce stress, whether it is in writing, cooking, handywork, or art.  The more creative you are and the more you allow your essential self to shine through the happier you will be with the result.  I believe we have all been put on the planet for a reason.  Then, life happens and we don't get round to it because there is always something in the way.  The children need this, that, and the next thing, or your partner, mate, or business, parents, etc.  Or you feel you aren't ready because you don't know enough and you just need this degree, then the next and the next, and this workshop, and so on.  When are you going to say this is enough now!  It is my time, and it is time to start that project that you have been putting off for as long as you can remember.  Yes that one that you have been dreaming about for the past 1, 2 , 3, 5 , 10 years. Don't wait till the end of your life and then say, "damn, if only....."

Start now.  You are ready.  If you don't know where to start, I will help ou find the first steps that will take you along your path, and build momentum so that you can LIVE YOUR DREAM.

Coach Coaching Stars

Make your life your ART.

African Arts and Crafts

Life Coaching: Benefits, Description, Definition and comparison with other related practices

What is Life Coaching?
Coaching is a thought provoking and creative, collaborative partnership between client and coach to develop and maximize your personal and business potential.

• Coaching helps you discover what’s really important to you, gives you a different view of things and opens up more possibilities in your personal and professional life.
• Through greater awareness you are able to make better, more effective decisions, which speed up your growth, learning and progress.
• Coaching helps narrow the gap between what you have and what you want. Practical tools, processes, methods, and techniques help make this change easier, smoother and faster.
• As coaches we are trained to observe and to listen to what is being said between the lines, as well as what is not being said. We then adapt our methods to your needs.
• The coach’s job is to:
• recognize your strengths and build on it
• encourage you to achieve short, medium and long term goal
• increase conscious awareness
• improve self mastery
• enhance strategic action
• provide a sounding board for ideas
• support you to develop your skills and become more creative
• assist you to make better use of your resources
• help you see what is stopping you or tripping you up
• develop your potential to achieve exceptional results
  

• Coaching assists you to achieve your desires and live your passion(s).

Why coaching?

Every high-performing person in the world, from athlete to business leader to political leader, has a coach in one form or another. High-performers know it is essential to have someone they trust who keeps them on their toes while having their best interests at heart.

Coaching is NOT about being told what, when and how to do things. You decide.

If you feel like you’re busy (fighting fires, handling crises, too much to do and too little time) you may find that the days turn into weeks and years and your dreams are still just that, DREAMS. Don’t let this happen to you (any longer). You don’t have to do it on your own.


Supremacy of the individual

Living in a society which often places a higher value on me than we and the idea that "I have to do it on my own; It is better to achieve something without help from anyone; it somehow devalues my achievement if I don't do it all by myself", is really sad.

Humans are social animals. We get more joy and pleasure working in harmony with other human beings. Together in partnership we are capable of far more than either of us would have been capable of on our own. It increases our joy to have someone to share and celebrate it with. When we share a “failure”, we get over it faster because we don’t have to carry the burden on our own.

“Two heads are better than one”.
...With this in mind: “How much further and faster do you think you will be able to go to become more of what you want, if you had the assistance of the right, committed partner, that holds your success as the highest purpose of that relationship?


I invite you to explore this truth; "two heads are better than one", for yourself, right now, click here to set up a free sample session.



Benefits of working with a coach

A coach assists you to:

• Take more, better and smarter actions - because you set the goals you really want.
• People do what they really want to do anyway. To leverage this, my first task is to assist you to find out exactly what you really want for yourself and your business. I help you to distinguish between all the must's, could's, should's, have to's, ought to's and what you really desire and want. Once you create your desired goal, you are much more likely to take consistent action to achieve it.
• Have a well-balanced, nourishing and flourishing life.
• Having it all means finding your balance and honouring who and what you are. This sense of self-contentment underpins everything else. It is time for you to get your needs met, and still have people like you. You know you are worth it.

Use your time more efficiently and effectively.
It is no use being frenetically busy and not getting to where you want to be. You’ll identify the difference between what is important and urgent and how to deal with that, and what to delegate.

Have more money sense.
You are worth much more than you are making, actually you can’t be paid what you are worth. And yet we squander so much and get into debt. I’ll help you set up a financial plan to have and generate more money, get rid of debt and move towards financial independence. You’ll design a strategy that will help you increase your income, reduce your overheads and get more from your professional efforts.

Have clear focus. Make better decisions for yourself and your business.
The coach believes the client is naturally creative and resourceful. We are all very smart and have tons of ideas, but we don’t act on them for various reasons. There is huge value in sharing ideas with someone you can trust to give you an honest, constructive opinion. It may not always be easy to hear. Remember I have your best interests at heart. Just talking about your options is often enough to have it all become clear.

Have a lot more sustainable energy and joy - bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
Doing things you don’t really want to do drains your energy and life becomes a struggle. With a sense of direction, purpose and meaning in your life, and an openness to fresh perspectives, it is much easier to deal with frustrations and challenges and even change these into opportunities. Taking care of your own needs means you have more personal satisfaction with life and work. A greater awareness of what makes you tick enhances your capacity, compassion and understanding of others.
Reach for more, much more.
Doing what you are passionate about and loving what you do is surely better than merely making ends meet.

Salman Rushdie had a saying I can relate to: "One of the things a writer is good for is to say the unsayable, speak the unspeakable and ask difficult questions." (1947). – Replace “writer” with “coach”.

Why coaching is a big deal.
The traditional assistance model was one of

• teacher – student,
• consultant – client,
• preacher – hapless subject.

The weakness of these models is the fact that after the teacher preacher consultant leaves, all that is left is book learning faith the fat report and the student hapless subject client is left to his/her own devices trying to muddle through on the road to OZ/way to Paradise. Even though the advice may have been great and the plans wonderful, they were really offered in the spirit of:

"If you do what I say, all will be well."

Left to their own devices, people struggle and often fail to reach the expected results.

1. They may not understand the implications of the sequence nor the relationship between each part or action, or they haven’t bought into it entirely because their circumstance is different in some way.
2. The “How” is never discussed.
3. The capabilities, knowledge and resources of the individual aren’t matched with the task at hand. So a lot of effort and/or time invested leads to limited results and frustration.

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Some differences and similarities between Coaching and other Roles

Coaching differs in some aspects from sports coaching.
Principles like teamwork, going for the goal and being your personal best are the same for both coaching models. Professional coaching, however, is not based on competition where someone wins and someone loses. A coach strengthens the client's skills rather than just helping him to beat the other, in order to have a win-win situation.


The difference between coaching and consulting.

A consultant is an expert in his field. S/he dispenses advice and has answers, holds the agenda, imparts knowledge and offers suggestions and processes to improve effectiveness and increase success.
Coaching sees the client as creative, capable, intelligent, and having answers within themselves or the resources to find them. Coaches act on the premise that the definitive expert regarding your life and work is you.


The difference between coaching and mentoring

The protégé picks a mentor. "A mentor can be a sounding board, they can give advice and share their experience.”

In a business environment a coach may be allocated so you may not have the choice you do when you select a personal coach The coach can also be a sounding board, rarely gives advice, but rather assists the client to work things out for themselves, and/or guides them through creative enquiry. Coaching is impartial, focused on improvement in behaviour and may challenge, if necessary.


The difference between Coaching and Therapy

The context that is created for asking questions is the defining difference between coaching and therapy.

Therapy: In this relationship the therapist is the expert.

The therapist tries to: unearth, confront, diagnose, expose, intervene and adjust. The therapy session may focus on: disorders, dysfunctions, symptoms, pathology, episodes, behaviors, recurrent patterns, trauma and the reasons for these.

Coaching: In coaching there is an equal co-creative relationship where the coach offers perspectives and assists the client to discover their own answers. The coach helps a client to: set goals, focus, prioritize, be proactive, clarify, brainstorm and achieve, and emphasizes: outcome, balance, purpose, options, actions, requests, assignments, strategies and money management.

Both attempt to change habitual ways of doing things and explore different points of view.


The primary distinction lies in the client’s need and intention. Clients seek:

• Traditional counselling or therapy when they sense something is wrong.
• Coaching when they sense something is not quite right, off a bit, out of balance, or needs improvement. The distinctions lies in the degree, where things aren’t as you’d like them to be.
• Coaching when they want to focus more on changing future behaviour.

E.g. Let’s say you wanted to learn to ride a bike. If you hired a:

Therapist, the therapist would help you find out what might be holding you back from riding the bike. S/he would delve into your past to discover what kinds of experience you have had with bikes and what your primary caregivers thought of bike-riding.

Consultant, the consultant would bring you a book and tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the bike, even with step-by-step instructions what to do. The consultant would then leave you. S/he might return six months later to see whether you managed to ride the bike.

Mentor, the mentor would share his/her experiences of riding bikes and the wisdom and lessons s/he had learned and what helped him/her to learn faster, e.g. extra side-wheels.

Coach, the coach would seat you on the bike, make sure the side-wheels were in the right position, hold on to the seat, and encourage, endorse, acknowledge and support you until you felt comfortable enough to go it alone.

Interested?
I would love to hear from you.

To contact me... click here.


For lots of helpful hints and more information, please check my website at http://www.coach-coaching-stars.com/

Consciousness, Life and Transformation Coach

Are you doing it?


Mandela has done it, Julia Roberts is doing it, Tiger Woods has more than one.

Top performers are finding that coaching assists them to get better at whatever it is they want to improve on, whether it is relationships, health, bottom line, or anything else. People who have had dreams, but didn’t know how to make it happen, are now, with the assistance of a coach, picking the fruits of their labors. Other individuals, who have felt like misfits, have found their groove. Today there are coaches that specialize in every kind of field, not only sport. You can have a Life coach, Business coach, Success coach, Relationship coach, and so on.

My first coachee, about 10 years ago, was an unhappy IT manager. He was miserable because he was actually a technical person, but had been promoted to an admin job with endless meetings, company politics, posturing, red tape, and everything that goes with a management position in a “normal” corporate environment. After some coaching he spent a few months in preparation getting himself clued up in techno-speak in the field of his choice. Today he is a happy workaholic techie diving into new exciting challenges whenever he has the opportunity.

A friend of mine wanted her own jewelry line. She is now exporting her jewelry only 6 months later with a full production line and all.

New possibilities open up when you get coached, and you realize; that which you thought was out of reach, is actually much more attainable and sooner than you ever imagined possible.

Research, like the Manchester report, for example, has shown that organizations have a 500 - 700% ROI when their staff get regular coaching.

Primary benefits of coaching: In a survey of 4000+ corporations on their involvement with corporate coaching, (in order):
· Improved individual performance
· Bottom line results (including profit)
· Client service and competitiveness
· Development of people for the next level, raised confidence, skills and self empowerment, goal achievement, relationship improvements, and retention.

Whatever your reason for wanting some aspect of your life different: Allow me to be your partner in your quest; to assist you in this journey to reveal what you are missing.


Untap your riches!

For a free introductory session Click here


Testimonials:


TESTIMONIAL: Carol Nelson - I work from home as a freelance artist and Life Alignment Practitioner. I felt like I needed a structure that was professional and I also needed to manage my time more efficiently. I found that although I was able to make ends meet, there was no extra cash for emergencies and certainly none for entertainment and luxuries. I had little or no marketing strategies in place either.
In my mind I had thought that by going for coaching I would be handed a package by the life coach, on how to run my business smoothly and it would include all the things I was struggling with. To my great surprise, that was not how the session went. Instead, I was coached into first of all naming the areas of weakness and to make certain commitments to myself. Once I had made the commitments, I felt the responsibility of owning my business and really taking care of it as opposed to someone else telling me how to do it.

Through a specific set of questions, I was coached into my own power and made promises to myself to do certain tasks in order for my business to have the structure I was looking for, and to improve in all the areas I had named at the beginning of my session. I set goals and dates to achieve these by. I was pushed beyond my comfort zone to be creative and to challenge myself to be extraordinary which I would not have had the courage to do if I had not been for this session.I left after an hour with my coach, feeling very positive, excited and ready to put into action all the new ideas and choices I had made for my business. Once home, I reorganized my workspace and put up calendars with all my goals on them to remind myself of my promises. It has been two weeks now and I am just as enthusiastic as the day I walked out of my session with the life coach. This process has made me feel enlivened, empowered and hopeful. It is certainly something I would highly recommend to other freelance people who need to empower themselves.

TESTIMONIAL: Carol Hampshire - Sonja has a wonderful coaching style that made it easy to search deeper within myself in order to gain clarity on how I was going to achieve the goals I set. She is a supportive, compassionate and dedicated coach that not only helped me to achieve my goals, but also made me aware of maintaining a healthy balance between body, mind and soul (as well as keeping a healthy sense of humour). I have no reservation in recommending Sonja as a life coach.

TESTIMONIAL: Rayhaana Davis - I have been privileged to be coached by Sonja Wilker. During my sessions with Sonja, I have found myself leaving having had huge break-throughs and the insight I have gained was that of being kind to myself and that of true commitment in creating my own opportunities in order to lead a more fulfilling life.

Sonja has proved to be a more sound person that displays a diligent and conscientious attitude towards her own commitments and awareness and thus supporting me in producing the best outcome for myself. I found her insightful and able to challenge, not for the sake of challenging but when she felt that I was ready to address an issue that requires possible deeper analysis.

I found her to be tenacious, employing effort and sincerity to facilitate me through my journey or rather to find light at the end of the tunnel. I am very comfortable, supported and not judged being coached by Sonja and in the future would definitely continue my sessions with her.

TESTIMONIAL: Alexander Margull - Sonja Wilker has been my coach partner. She has been coaching me via Skype. Her time integrity is impeccable and she has built a good rapport with me. My overall observation is that Sonja is a committed coach who believes in my greatness and has assisted me in achieving great insights and awareness of myself.

Her dedication to coaching is exemplary and although she demanded the best from me, she was always compassionate. I have enjoyed my coaching sessions with her and through her coaching I have achieved specific goals and have realised my strengths, counteracted my negative beliefs and been able to be in action.

I therefore recommend Sonja Wilker as a coach.