What is coaching?
Coaching is a creative partnership with an experienced (and we recommend certified) coach, who will use your sessions together as a conversation and process to discover your goals, explore the possibilities, and create action to move forward. Coaching can be transformational! The conversation in itself is the most powerful tool of the coaching process, but your coach can work with you to choose assessments and other tools to complement your goals for coaching.

What tangible results can I expect from our time together?

Results might include, but are not limited to:

• Clarifying your dreams and goals and the surprising and unique ways you can move forward into them.
• Identifying your mission, values, strengths, gifts, and making decisions and choices that honor those.
• Identifying obstacles along the way that keep you from meeting your goals and dreams.
• Applying tools or new thinking that propel you forward.
• Creating strategies that support and strengthen who you are and who you are becoming and your life and leadership goals.

All of these, of course, depend on a client’s willingness to be fully open and engaged in the coaching process. This could involve identifying and stepping out of comfort zones that hinder forward movement.

Are these places I could get myself to without a life coach? In other words, why should I hire a life coach?

Yes, we fully believe you can reach goals and make progress without a coach. But we also wouldn’t be coaching if we felt it couldn’t make a huge difference for any of us–even the most self-motivated among us.

The coaching process uses tools and conversations that greatly augment awareness and the design of action steps that keep a person moving forward in their growth and toward their goals. The partnership of coach and client facilitates discovery and refining of areas of desired growth and dreams and goals, and provides a process to address the barriers that may otherwise prevent progress.

A person can, and often does, continue patterns of thinking and behavior for years unaware or unable to pinpoint those, therefore preventing movement forward with greater clarity and success–career, personal, or spiritual. Our coaching conversations allow space to identify those patterns and to move forward differently and more powerfully.

Also, though we seek to support and strengthen self-accountability, there is accountability inherent in the process.

What types of clients have you worked with? What were their results?

We have worked with individual clients, including teens and adults, parents, educators, leaders, and pastors. We have also been involved in coaching-related opportunities and training with teams, ministries, schools, and organizations.

Considering the very unique stories and coaching processes among the clients we’ve worked with, a few of the results that come to mind are:

• Greater clarity of values and goals, and therefore grounding in commitment to action steps discovered or created through the coaching conversation.
• Increased excitement and energy around their life and goals.
• Increased experience of freedom, deepening peace, and also joy as barriers to progress and goals are discovered and overcome.
• Growing confidence in tackling barriers, transitions, and goals that initially felt out of reach or overwhelming.
• A natural, increasing application of what they are learning within coaching to situations outside of our coaching conversation.
• Strengthened clarity of thought and communication to others in personal and business relationships.

For those who have requested and contracted to include the spiritual dynamic to our coaching process, additional results have included:

• Deepening discovery of God’s presence and who God created them to be.
• Excitement and energy in exploring what that means for health, relationships, life, and work.

Generally, we find that we love being a part of the process as coaches because it is a joy to watch greater courage and fullness of life coming about in unique ways for each person or team.

How does contracting work?

You will contact the coach you choose and she will set up a 30-minute discovery conversation to explore the options that would be right for you and to answer any questions you have about the coaching process and contracting.

If you decide to move forward and contract with your coach, she will work with you to discover the scheduling arrangement that would be most effective for you and that works for both of your schedules. We suggest meeting a minimum of twice per month, but we might work together for a period of time once a week if goals are time sensitive and that schedule would best support your coaching goals.

Usually we contract an initial minimum of six to eight sessions. These are either paid in advance fully as a package (includes a savings), or monthly payments can be arranged, due at the beginning of each month.

As a part of our contracting conversation, we can discuss how we might utilize coaching tools and e-mail support between sessions.

More Questions?

We invite you to explore the site to learn more about Voice of Courage and Sarah and Jan. A place to begin is on our page, Who We Are. Or explore the other tabs below this one to learn more about our individual or team coaching options.

Please contact us if you have any remaining questions about the coaching or contracting process or are ready to begin coaching and would like to schedule a 30-minute complementary discovery coaching consultation.

We look forward to discovering how we can partner with you or your team in pursuing your life and leadership vision and goals!

Sarah Bond – ICF Certified Coach, ACC
Jan Kern – ICF Certified Coach, ACC, Certified Transformational Coach, C-IQ Enhanced Skills Coach

Are you longing to take your goals and dreams to the next level? To see with fresh eyes where you are and where you want to go? To name and overcome obstacles? To capture creative ways to make your vision and calling a daily reality?

Individual coaching may be a great fit for your professional and personal transformation! Both Jan and Sarah coach around a wide variety of coaching areas in life and leadership, but both also specialize:

Sarah also loves coaching clients in designing a clear vision for the organization of their home space. She enjoys coaching clients in their career journeys and the launching of their dream businesses.

Jan supports clients in moving through transitions or in discovering and stepping to the work they’d really love. As a writer and author herself, she also coaches writers in designing nonfiction projects with strong impact. 

Please contact us for more information or a 30 minute complementary coaching consultation:

Sarah Bond – ICF ACC Certified Coach, Organization Coach, Narrative Coach
Jan Kern – ICF ACC Certified Coach, Certified Transformational Coach, C-IQ Enhanced Skills Coach, Narrative Coach

Invite your team to benefit from the coaching process. We offer creative space for your team to hear one another’s goals and dreams for accomplishing your mission together. And we can leverage your team interaction with coaching questions and tools, which can provide new clarity, unity, and redefinition to your shared values.

Let us tailor team coaching to your specific goals, and draw from our life coaching training in emotional and conversational intelligence, strengths coaching, participatory approaches to community development, and the DISC or other complementary assessments.

Or, combine your favorite prayer retreat offerings with team coaching to create a contemplative prayer planning process that can ground you or your team in prayer as you seek God’s vision and strategic next moves for your work and those you are called to serve

Please contact us for more information or to schedule an exploratory conversation to design an event for your team.

Spend a day with our leadership team and other leaders in your community, with space provided to learn, discuss, and engage with new ideas and practical tools to transform and inspire your leadership. Our leadership trainings draw from the spiritual formation practices, coaching questions, and leadership tools we share on our blog and other portions of our website.

Topics include but are not limited to:

A Coach Approach to Leadership

Asking powerful questions with a posture and heart that inspires, affirms, joins, and equips your team and constituents for activation and transformation.

Participatory Development

Empowering approaches for community transformation and social justice.

Theology of Your Community

How to assess the strengths and opportunities in your target community or population. What is God’s letter of invitation to you on behalf of those you serve?

Conversational and Emotional Intelligence

Integrating positive psychology and an understanding of neuroscience for more effective leadership.

Your Voice, Your Story, Your Influence

Discovering your voice in your writing, speaking, and leading.

Sign up on our contact page to receive news of upcoming leadership trainings or to schedule a training for your organization or team.