What is Coaching?
Coaching is like having someone in your corner who’s genuinely curious about your journey, ready to ask the questions that spark those “aha” moments. It’s about helping you discover your strengths, navigate the ups and downs, and grow into the person you want to be.
But here’s what it’s not: Always feeling 100%, never failing, or finding a quick fix that makes everything amazing.
Coaching is about building confidence and resilience—learning to trust that you’ll be okay no matter what comes your way. Together with your coach, you’ll explore different mindsets and perspectives to find what works for you—allowing you to move through the world looking for opportunity, learning from setbacks, and both loving and trusting yourself on your journey.
Whether you’re facing big life choices or just trying to make sense of it all, I’m here to help you navigate the paths and be a sounding board on your journey.
Colleen’s Approach
I believe in starting slow to go fast—taking the time to really understand why you’ve stepped into coaching and what you’re looking to achieve. We’ll explore the patterns and possibilities that might be holding you back or could serve as the rocket fuel for your success. My coaching is grounded in trust, curiosity, and the belief that you are smarter, braver, and more capable than you might think.
I strive to ensure you leave every session feeling capable to take on the rest of your week. Together, we’ll make the tough stuff less scary and the good stuff even better.
Let’s discover what makes you, you.
Whether you’re balancing school and friends, figuring out friendships, looking for a career you’ll love, or sharpening your focus and organizational skills, coaching can help you uncover your strengths and learn new tools to succeed.
Youth coaching is like having a mix of a tutor and a mentor—someone who supports you and explores possibilities as you navigate life’s ups and downs, but always with you leading the way.
You’re in the right place if any of these resonate with you...
- It’s tough to tell who you are through all the noise – the media, friends, and expectations – but you’re ready to see beyond that and find your true self.
- You feel like you don’t fit the mold of the ‘shoulds’ and expectations of others.
- You want to make a difference in the world, but you don’t know where to start.
- It feels challenging to share your experience with friends, and you’re ready to unpack it all in a safe space.
- You want to unpack and explore what you really want and step into who you’re ready to be.
- You’re approaching big life decisions and transitions, unsure of your next step.
Everything you may be wondering about coaching:
What is Coaching?
What is coaching (formal description)
The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.
We all have goals we want to reach, challenges we’re striving to overcome and times when we feel stuck. Partnering with a coach can change your life, setting you on a path to greater personal and professional fulfillment.”
What is the difference between coaching and therapy?
Although coaches and therapists share a common goal – supporting clients in enhancing wellbeing and achieving desired outcomes – they are not equal and the level of support they can offer is vastly different.
A therapist has extensive schooling and training to equip them to help a range of clients and are specifically trained to support clients experiencing severe levels of distress or dysfunction. A therapist is trained to help clients get back to normalcy and begin moving onto thriving.
A coach on the other hand, is equipped to support clients that feel they function fine with day-to-day tasks, and are looking for to be better, grow, and stretch themselves to reach bigger goals.
The Youth Coaching Institute has a great article going into more detail.
Coach, Mentor, Teacher – what’s the difference?
A teacher typically has extensive knowledge in a particular topic or subject. They are often skilled at presenting the information in different ways to make the content accessible to various learners.
A mentor is often a person that has traversed the path, or one similar to the path you are wanting to embark on. They can provide guidance and tips on how to prepare, what to watch out for, short cuts, and how to navigate the path successfully.
A coach is there to help you learn and develop new skills to achieve your goals. A coach provides a space to explore where you are at and provide thought-provoking questions and exercises to uncover the skills necessary for you to take that next step towards your goals. A coach empowers you to set meaningful goals and supports you to create the scaffolding to go for those goals – identifying learning or skills gaps, creating action plans, and identifying the purpose or values behind your goals to create the space to pivot when life throws you a curve ball!
Who is coaching for?
Coaching may be for you if:
- You are wanting to level up your leadership, improve your relationships, or increase your overall life satisfaction.
- You are wanting to increase your confidence, turn down the self-doubt, and feel more grounded in who you are.
- You are wanting support and scaffolding to help you set and achieve your goals – from academic to friendships, career, communication, leadership and any goal in between!
What does a coaching session look like?
Your very first session – this first session has a dual-purpose. First, we want to capture and document where you are at; your starting point to measure progress against! Next, we will explore where you want to go and why, and craft specific, meaningful goals you want to work towards during your coaching sessions.
Regular sessions:
- To prep for your coaching session, you will complete a short pre-session questionnaire 24 hours prior to your call – questions are geared to get you thinking and prepared for your session by reflecting on your last session, your week, and what you want to cover during your next session.
- We start every session with a check-in: where are you at, anything you need to clear, celebrate or share?
- We’ll do a quick progress check-in on your action items from the previous session.
- You get to set a specific goal for this session – a micro goal that will move you forward on your larger goals. Sometimes this will come easily, other times we may need to spend some time teasing out the right goal for the session.
- Then we dive in! This will look different every session, depending on where you are at and what intention you have set for this session. It will always start with curiosity and may flow into an exercise, a thought experiment, role playing a scenario for practice, or other tools to lean into the developing the skills you need to achieve your goals.
- Before wrapping up, you will get to set an action item (or a few) for the week ahead, that will allow you to practice a skill you are working on or make progress on your goal.
- And finally, we will recap – what value did you create, what did you learn, what tools or lessons are you taking away with you into your week?
Goal Setting
Why is having a goal important in Coaching?
Coaching works best when we have a destination we are moving towards. It helps to guide the process, so we both know when we are on track and when we may need to course correct!
A goal in coaching ensures the coach and client are moving in the same direction! Without a goal, we are merely paddling around a lake aimlessly. Which could be leisurely or an absolute battle of blood, sweat and tears, but neither leaves you with a sense of accomplishment when the purpose was not clear at the outset.
Having a goal gives you something to move towards, a gauge for your progress, and a line to say “I did it!” when crossed!
I have a direction, but my goal doesn’t fit the SMART model, is that okay?
Sometimes we feel clear about a goal but struggle to articulate it or wrap arms around it in a way that fits into the widely accepted SMART goal framework (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-bound).
The SMART goal model is really helpful to define the parameters of our finite goals – to define the edges of the track we’re running and the finish line. However, sometimes we have infinite goals that are worthy of pursuit, but VERY hard to nail down with clarity.
A finite goal might be to train for and run a Marathon by the end of the summer. An infinite goal might be to increase my overall fitness in a sustainable way, so I can run and play with my grandkids as long as possible.
You can see how the first would fit into the SMART model fairly easily, the 2nd not so much. But that does not mean the 2nd is not a worthy goal, it just needs a different approach! Coaching is great for that 2nd type of goal, as those infinite goals can be more like a science experiment, where we pose hypothesis, run tests, assess the data, and iterate to continually move us along the path of that goal.
At any given moment, you can ask yourself if you are moving closer to or farther away from the goal, but it does not have a clear finish line to cross. Through coaching, we get clear on the infinite goal, and then run experiments in the form of finite goals that DO fit in the SMART model, because our brains thrive on clarity and deadlines.
We will run short sprints in the form of SMART goals, and at the end we check in with the larger goal to ensure we are still on track!
I have a REALLY hard time setting goals – (dislike of or resistance to goal setting)
For me, goal setting was always a painful process – if I saw it was a part of a program I had signed up for, I would get anticipatory anxiety about the process!
I finally had a coach work with me to explore why I struggled so much with setting goals, and we discovered 2 things: How I process the information and the world does not always lend itself well to the traditional goal-setting frameworks. And second, I had some deeply held beliefs about goals and success that were getting in the way of me leveraging goals effectively! (more info on that below if you are interested)
My approach to goals today is a little different as a result of what I learned about myself. My intention during coaching is to find a way to work with goals that serves you! If traditional goal-setting strategies and tools do not work for you, lets explore other possibilities!
I am WITH YOU through the process, and can provide as much or little support to help you discover what you want to work towards and set goals to help you get there! If you need to talk it through – Let’s go! If you need to mind-map it, cheers! If you want to draw and bring in different mediums that work for you, I’m all for it!
My intention is to support you in finding a way to leverage goals to help you move towards what you want more effectively and efficiently!
Here is a little more detail on what my coach helped me discover about why goal-setting caused such a mental block for me!
- Goal-setting has always felt very linear to me, going from point A to point B. My brain very much thinks non-linearly, and thus when trying to set a goal, all the what-ifs would derail the process. I needed to learn to set goals that left room for possibility!
- I am very much a verbal processor – I need to talk it out loud to make sense of my thoughts. But so often I was required to have my goals fully formed before I brought them to a space, and that is just not what works for my brain!
Learning that it is not only okay, but 100% necessary for me to chat about my goals with multiple people, from multiple angles to get to clarity has changed my emotional reaction to goal setting – in a good way! - I discovered I had a deep, unconscious belief that goals were a measurable dimension of success. The more goals I achieved the more successful I was, and any goals I failed took points away from my success.
And growing up in a family system that put a LOT of value on success, I was scared to risk those negative points on my success, and thus I didn’t set goals that I did not know that I knew that I could succeed at.
I am sure you can see the flaw in this logic – if I know that I can, it isn’t a goal, it is a to-do! For anything that was a stretch, I was flying blind because I was too scared to define a goal, for fear of failing! - I learn to think of goals in two different categories: finite and infinite goals (Thank you Simon Sinek and his book, The Infinite Game).
Finite goals are those with a clearly defined beginning and end, and clearly defined parameters of play.
Infinite goals are those with no clear end, and the parameters of play are only to continue the pursuit of the goal. These are often abstract goals with roots in our purpose or values. They are often something we are working towards but may never actually ‘achieve.’ - I learned to set finite goals that were in service of the infinite goal, and all of a sudden failing to achieve a finite goal did not feel so scary or crushing! A failure was merely a data point to learn from.
I learned to hold the finite goals loosely in service of the bigger, more meaningful, infinite
What is the process of refining and defining a goal through coaching?
As long as you have an idea of what you want to move towards, we can dive in. We will spend the first few sessions diving in deep with curiosity – exploring what you already know about the direction you want to move in, why that direction is important to you, and teasing out details that will act as guides or dropped pins on the map.
We will take a look at all the pieces and start prioritizing the aspects of the goal or direction to get a sense for what are must-haves and what are only nice-to-haves.
Next we will take a step back and view all the data from a distance and see what patterns and clusters we can see.
From there we will hypothesize some different versions of the destination or goal, until we land on one that feels right for you!
We will work to get clarity on the big-picture goal first, and then craft a first-step goal(s) to get started in the direction of the big-picture destination.
A good analogy is to think of it like going to a travel agent to book your next holiday! The travel agent isn’t going to tell you where to go, but they are going to support you in finding a destination that is a great fit for your dreams, calendar and budget.
You may have a few ideas of where you want to go, your budget, dates, etc. but you know there are SO many possibilities and the travel agent will help you filter the clutter to figure out what is actually important to you to craft the right trip!
You may be coming in with some beliefs that are impacting the options you currently see as possible, and the travel agent will help you sort out beliefs from reality. Maybe you believe that the place you REALLY want to go is too expensive, so you aren’t even considering it. When the travel agent gets curious around that, they may be able to challenge that belief by sharing times of the year it is actually quite affordable to travel there! Now, if your schedule is flexible, you CAN make that your destination
Your travel agent leans in with curiosity to draw out key features that are important to you, to help open up possibility, and from there they help you narrow in on what would be a meaningful trip for you!
THAT is where coaching starts – getting clear on a destination that is actually meaningful and desirable to YOU! Not something you believe you should do or be, not something you are settling for because you don’t believe your real desire is accessible to you.
And maybe that dream vacation is not accessible for you this year, but if we both know that is where you really want to go, we can make a plan and take intentional steps to bring it closer to reality – even if that reality is 10 years out!
When you work with a coach to goal set, we can work together to find your north star – the thing that is calling you forward. That big goal might be too big to tackle in our coaching time, but we can chunk it down to a manageable step that moves you closer and sets a path.
What if I want to change my goal part way through?
You are in control of where we take our sessions, so if you want to change your goal, that is 100% your choice and I will follow your lead, after a coaching conversation.
We will have a discovery conversation around the goal change, getting curious about why and where the urge to change directions has come from.
My role as your coach is to support you in your pursuit of your goals. And from that vein, I will leverage curiosity to understand if the desire to change goals is stemming from fear, discomfort, lack of confidence or a possible misalignment of values.
If it is fear, discomfort, or lack of confidence in yourself that is driving the desire to change your goal, often there is something behind it that is worth diving into.
Fear, discomfort or lack of confidence are often symptoms of getting close to a vulnerability. Abandoning the goal will not eliminate the vulnerability, it will merely go dormant until we get close to it again with the next goal. It is often most beneficial to lean into the vulnerability right now, instead of changing goals and merely delaying addressing it.
If, on the other hand, the desire to change the goal stems from uncovering new information or feelings that have changed how well aligned we feel this goal is, a goal change might be the right move.
Often short-term goals are a hypothesis about what we think will move us closer to our larger goal. And sometimes we notice part way through the goal pursuit that it will not move us closer to our goal, in which case abandoning it and setting a new goal might be the appropriate plan!
So can you change your goal – it is up to you! If changing your goal moves you back into alignment with your values and bigger goals, you have my enthusiastic support to change goals!
If changing your goal merely delays dealing with an obstacle, we are going to have a conversation about the costs and benefits of avoiding the obstacle. We may make an add-on goal to tackle the vulnerability that has popped up. Or we may choose to shift your goal to something that feels more manageable right now, AND make a goal to build whatever you will need to overcome the vulnerable obstacle the next time it pops up.
**Note that obstacles when flat-out avoided often transform into mutli-layered problems down the road. Obstacles acknowledged and engaged with in some way become a friendly foe we get more comfortable with each time we encounter them!
Coaching Prices & Packages
What areas do you offer coaching in?
I offer 1:1 youth coaching, for youth between 12-18, working on goals such as building confidence and resilience, navigating friendships, time management, organization, studying, and navigating increased independence and changing relationships with parents.
I offer 1:1 career discovery coaching for young adults exploring their career path for the first time, as well as for adults navigating a career transition or pivot at any point in their career.
My approach is to help you find what type of work and approach to work lights you up and allows you to do your best work. From there we explore your values to help identify what to look for and prioritize in prospective company cultures.
We will utilize the Working Genius model and the Sparketype Assessment as a framework and starting point for the discovery conversations.
I offer 1:1 leadership coaching for individuals leading teams of 5-10 direct reports, with a special interest in supporting emerging leaders in the customer service space. If you care about your team and want to serve them well so they can serve your customers well, then let’s have a chat!
What is included in a coaching package?
6-session Coaching Package. The first session is 75 minutes to allow time to goal-set and the remaining 5 sessions are 50-60 minutes in length. All 6 session will take place over zoom, and are to be completed within 12 weeks of the first session. You will also get access to text and email support or check-ins between sessions, if you want it.
What if I want try coaching but I’m not ready to buy a full package?
Coaching works best when we have some runway to get going. It takes a session or two to get solid footing around your goals, as well as some time to build trust and for you to get comfortable with the coaching process.
The coaching package is designed to create a long enough runway to give you a chance to build momentum towards your goal(s) so they can take off when you are ready. While also being short enough that if something does not feel right for you, you can safely abandon take-off without harm.
Once we have the foundation from completing a coaching package with Coach Colleen, you will have the option to continue with another package or book one session at a time, whichever serves you best.
If you want to meet Coach Collen and explore what coaching could look like for you, please book a free discovery call today!
How much does coaching cost?
Coaching with Colleen
What types of goals or areas of Coaching does Colleen like to play in?
I absolutely love supporting youth as they are learning to navigate their new-found independence, discovering who they are as their own unique individual, and exploring the roles, responsibilities and opportunities they take on with each new year!
Growing up is exciting, but can also be scary and hard to navigate, and regardless of how great our parents, they are SO HARD TO talk to (Article from Child Mind Institute).
During those tough teenage years, youth need trusted adults, outside of their parents, to turn to, to process and navigate the hard things and new experiences they encounter. I am so grateful to get to be that trusted human for emerging adults!
My favourite space to play and support clients with is that mirky gap in relationships between intention and impact. That space where assumptions are made, misunderstandings happen, feelings are hurt, and communication brakes down.
This is where we get to dive into communication styles, personality or neurotype differences, and basic differences in context and perspective.
Supporting clients to get curious instead of furious, to extend generous assumptions towards other’s intentions, and to widen their lens to take in multiple perspectives to further inform the situation.
So much of the leadership development and exploration has roots in this space, and I love working with clients to create space to expand their perspectives to deepen relationships and level up their communication!
Supporting others to discover the kind of work that makes them come more fully alive is an absolute JOY! I discovered my own Sparketype and Working Genius profile in 2021 and started taking steps to align my work to allow me to come more fully alive and do more of what energizes me and less of what drains me.
Rejigging my work created more capacity, better focus, and more enjoyment for me in my work and life, and I have had a blast getting to work with clients to do the same in theirs!
Signs Colleen might be the right coach for me
If you are wanting to go deep and understand why you get stuck, let’s go! I love to lean in with curiosity to help uncover the why behind thoughts and behaviour. The intention is that with awareness and understanding you can self-select a different path. Buckle-up though, this can be uncomfortable work as you challenge your beliefs and start taking action that can feel scary because it is new.
If you are willing to spend a little more time on the front end getting curious and exploring what is meaningful to you, to help make a more grounded and informed decision on your goals, let’s go! I have a start slow to go fast kind of approach. We will take the time at the beginning of our coaching engagement to unpack and explore why you have stepped into coaching, what you are wanting support with and why, and really exploring what may have gotten in the way up to this point.
If you are looking for a safe space to process, and are willing to trust yourself, me and the process, let’s go! Trust is pivotal to the success of the coaching engagement, and I will do my best to create a safe space for you to land, process, and launch from during our coaching. Although trust will build and deepen over time, there is an inherent need for a base-level of mutual trust to get started that requires a bit of a leap of faith! After that, trust will continue to build one little action at a time, from both sides. I will trust that you will speak up for yourself and let me know when something is not working for you or if you require or would benefit from something more or different in our process. And I will honour your trust with a confidential container to process, belief in your greatness and ability to go after what is important to you, and the knowledge that YOU are the expert in your own life!
Trusting that discomfort is a necessary part of the process – if the process feels uncomfortable, lets explore why! Is it the process itself (in which case, lets shift), or is it what the process is bringing up (in which case, lets lean in and learn!)?
My brain is wired for curiosity and pattern recognition, and all brains are wired for story and to make meaning out of things. I will try my best to reflect the pattern and be curious without attaching, however I am human and I may slip up! If I have attached a meaning to a pattern or if I see a pattern that doesn’t resonate with your experience, let me know! This is YOUR time and your experience!
Huge believer in your resilience and capability! You are smarter than you think, braver than you imagine, and stronger than you feel! I love looking for and highlighting the glimmers in others that are hard to see in a mirror!
Signs Colleen might NOT be the right coach for me
If you want a consultant that will tell you what you should do, that will plan your path or that will set goals for you, I am not your coach. I am here to support you on your journey, to ask questions that get you thinking at a deeper level about your goals and possible paths to achieving them. I might offer a few possible paths as a launch pad for your creativity to get going, but it will always be followed with curiosity and conversation to ensure you are exploring a path that feels right for you. I will support you in evaluating the paths in front of you through curiosity and reflection of notices, to help you decide on the path of best alignment for you and your goals.
If you are looking for a Pity-Party-Planer, I am not your coach. I will hold space and compassion for your thoughts and feelings to exist and for you to feel them. Sometimes we just need space to acknowledge our experience, and that is 100% okay! However, staying in our feelings and over-identifying with them can cause us to fall into a victim mentality, where we become stuck and unable to take action. In coaching, our goal will be to acknowledge how you feel and move through the feelings so you can gain perspective on the situation to be able to assess it from a new elevation that will allow you to take action.
If you are looking for someone to hold your hand, hold your feet to the fire, or be a parole officer for your goals, I am not your coach. Accountability is always a part of our process, but not my primary focus as a coach. I will cheer you on and I will challenge you, but you will be fully responsible for showing up ready to do the work and completing your action items. I will hold space for accountability as part of our process, as a means of taking note of and learning from experiences. But I will not be forcing you to do the work or meticulously tracking how much or little you have done.
If you are looking for someone who will take responsibility for your success and someone to blame if you don’t achieve your goals, I am not your coach. I am not responsible for your success – you will get out of this process what you put in. I am here to support, challenge, engage, encourage, and share learning opportunities, and only you can pick any of that up and integrate it into your life and experience.
Quirks and Special Interests of Coach Colleen
Birds of a feather flock together, and if you LOVE ducks you have found your flock! I have always been drawn to the quirky confidence of ducks. When in flight, they appear to be battling for their life to stay in flight. Like they are amazed they can fly, while also terrified that at any moment they will fall from the sky! Their ability to look calm and serene on top of the water, while paddling ferociously below the surface has often felt like a metaphor for how I feel I am moving through the world! AND, 2 ducks are referred to as a “brace,” which gave an extra special note to my business name!
I have a large collection of emotional support books I LOVE reading and learning, but I primarily consume content through audio (podcasts and audiobooks) … and yet I cannot resist buying physical copies of books! I LOVE spending an hour or two wandering through a book store with a cup of coffee or tea, and I cannot resist picking up a few books along the way – I like to think of it as adopting books and giving them a new home!
I have never told a long story short in my entire life! I will always tell a short story long – you will get ALL the context, side-quests, and fun facts! I have a friend that jokes I need a “skip-intro” feature, but I think it is part of my *charm.*
When you hear me say, “Oh, that makes me think of…” or “Oh, that reminds me of…” or “My brain is connecting that to…” buckle up, we are going on an adventure! Sometimes the connection is short and clear, other times I will take you on a few side-quests to get to the main attraction … and sometimes I get distracted by the side-quest and forget what the main attraction was! Rest assured, it can be fun, interesting, and educational if you lean in and trust the process!
My social battery, when full, is like a super-boost – I have a big energy and can bring a lot of joy, enthusiasm, and excitement to a space! But it is a finicky battery that does not hold a charge well and takes forever to recharge! Even though the big energy is an authentic part of me and brings me incredible joy and connection, it is not where I spend most of my time. I walk through most of my days in social-energy saving mode. If you encounter me out in the wild, when I am not expecting to be social, you are likely to experience me powered-down mode – don’t take it personally, I’m not mad, sad, or upset, I’m just recharging!
