Coaching is about helping people make profound and lasting shifts in their lives.

The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as “Partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential”.  Coaches partner with clients to establish a meaningful outcome for each session that helps them to make progress toward their overarching goal for the coaching engagement

I am trained in a type of coaching named Core Energy Coaching.  I’ll describe it more here, in relation to traditional coaching.  Traditional Coaching is about helping another person strive toward their stated goals and objectives. This is accomplished by helping them follow through on tasks and respond to challenges. In this sense, it can be likened to a personal trainer, but instead of focusing on the body, a coach will work with a client on improving their lives or businesses.

On their own, too many people limit what they say they can or want to accomplish. They do this in the interest of being “realistic” or “practical.” In reality, they may have no idea what they are capable of and are simply afraid of disappointment.

Some individuals have grown accustomed to feeling successful just by lowering their expectations, or worse, setting no goals at all. Other people have all the enthusiasm they require and are great at constantly taking action, but can’t figure out why they repeatedly fail. There seem to be hidden blocks that cause them to always fall short of their goals and desires.

Core Energy Coaching is specifically designed to go far beyond just accountability or encouragement.  Through this co-creation process, we work on exploring new goals and broadening your sense of what is possible in your life.  We raise the deeper questions that you might not otherwise ask yourself.  You’ll be challenged to think bigger and start questioning the “story” you’ve told  yourself and have begun to accept.

Ultimately, we want to enable you to access an entirely new realm of possible results. We can achieve this by training you to become more aware of your internal worlds—specifically, your driving motivations and self-limiting factors. As a result of this exploration together, you can make permanent and profound shifts in the way you approach problems, goals, the world, and those around you.

The true effect of working with a coach has been difficult to quantify. Now, with new research, we have numbers—actual data—that show how working with a Core Energy Coach raises a person’s energy, so that in any given situation, one can choose to respond with anabolic energy related to opportunity, curiosity, creativity, and intuition versus more catabolic energy which reveals itself in behaviors like blame, anger, and worry.

“We were looking for evidence that coaching worked,” says Lynn Waldorf, PhD, CPC, who was tasked with analyzing a data set that contained data from about 30,000 people who had taken the Energy Leadership Index™ (ELI).

The ELI is a 70-item, web-based assessment that leads people through rating themselves on their beliefs, self-perceptions, emotional reaction tendencies, and behavior patterns. The questionnaire is designed to measure the amount of anabolic and catabolic energy in a person’s core energy makeup, under both ideal and stressful circumstances. The more a person can reduce catabolic energy and increase anabolic energy, the higher their core energy will be.

Finding #1: Coaching Raises Our Core Energy Levels

The first question Waldorf was looking to answer with the data was if working with an iPEC-trained Core Energy Coach could raise a person’s core energy. To do this, she identified and studied people who had taken the ELI twice—before and after working with a coach. She found that after working with a coach, people’s average resonating level of core energy increased from 3.25 to 3.52, a statistically significant increase.

“It may seem like a small increase, but it’s exponential in terms of growth,” says Liz Fisch, Senior Vice President of Program Development and Research for iPEC. “In coaching, things happen in small or large shifts, but even a small shift in any given moment can have a huge impact. If just one person shifts out of frustration and into the energy of opportunity, it can change the entire dynamic of a team.

For example, one choice to listen with curiosity at a weekly team meeting versus rushing to judgment can change the entire trajectory of a team. It only takes one second, but it can have a long-term effect.”

Finding #2: Coaching Helps Us Respond Better in Stressful Situations

Most of us respond to stressful situations with a lot of catabolic energy, which coaching can shift us out of. Waldorf wanted to measure what that shift looked like for people under stress—which is when the shift matters most.

She found that after working with an iPEC Core Energy Coach, people’s percentage of catabolic energy decreased from 68 to 59 percent while under stress, while their anabolic energy increased from 32 to 41 percent.

“These are very significant numbers, especially the decrease in catabolic energy. It indicates that coaching helped people have more control of their thoughts and behaviors rather than have an automatic reaction inside a stressful situation,” Waldorf says.

Finding #3: Coaching Increases Overall Life Satisfaction

“If someone’s core energy is higher and they are handling their stress better, does that impact how they report life satisfaction? Our theory was overall life satisfaction would increase as well,” Waldorf says.

In fact, she was right. After coaching, people reported increased levels of life satisfaction across the board, in 14 distinct areas, from financial success and engagement at work to leadership ability and work relationships.

The data, taken all together, tells a consistent story: There is clear evidence that Core Energy Coaching fulfills the promises it makes, and sets people up for realizing more success in life and in work.

Additional Information

More information on the benefits of coaching can be found in the International Coach Federation Research Portal including case studies and industry reports.