Why coaching? As far back as the year 2004, my work as a Marketing Manager at the multinational was overcoming me. I was completely overwhelmed even though everyday I was leaving the office late in the evening and working long hours. I never had the time to delegate, I spent the days running from meeting to meeting, and I could seldom be with my children. For my birthday, my wife gave me a very special present: coaching sessions. "Sessions of… what?" I asked her. "Just go and see what happens!" she replied to me.
Thanks to the coaching process I acquired new habits, a different way of prioritizing in life. I started to leave the office much earlier than before… and in a much better mood! After a few weeks, my manager called me to his office. "Uh oh” I thought "he’ll probably tell me that my commitment has decreased, that I’m not working long enough… ". But he said that he and my team were really satisfied with my performance; that then I was much more in control of my work. And he congratulated me for having matured so much. And I decided that "what the Coach had done for me is what I want to do for other people ". And here my vocation was born…
Who to coach? One more decision had to be done yet: Who do I want to coach? I cannot count how many times I had thought “If I had know this when I was a teen…”, “If I had realized that my life depended on my own decisions…”, and so on. So the answer came spontaneously, and today I’m one of the very few life coaches in Barcelona that work mostly with young people. And I can tell you that this decision has helped me so much with my own teens at home, and even with my own personal growth.
Where to learn? At The Coaching Academy, of course.
Let’s face it: Coaching teens is not exactly the same as coaching adults, and differences start by how scary it looks like upfront: How will I deal with teens? How should I manage the relationship with the parents? What are the legal procedures?... I’ve always known that I don’t want to be just a Coach: I wanted to excel as a Coach. And the first step to do so was to get the best available training: the “Youth Impact Diploma”. After several low-cost flights to London and a big bucket of patience from my family I made my objective a reality.
The Journey Accelerator Days and the trainers were great. The provided materials and tools were excellent. But it was the qualifying process that really rocketed my coaching to a higher level. If I had to give just one piece of advice to new coaches it’d be: use your qualifying process as a learning tool. It is not red tape. It rocks.
Today Now I’m really satisfied with my business. From the qualifying process I acquired the habit of writing the key learning points for each coaching session and my commitment for development. And this knowledge is providing me every day with better coaching skills and also with the basement for conferencing to parents in schools. Now I feel alive when I see my young clients’ eyes shining after setting clear priorities and goals, after discovering their own strengths, after realizing that they drive their own lives. Now I feel alive after conferencing, when parents are loaded with the energy required to make changes, or feel proud to be parents again. Yes, coaching teens is a wonderful job.
The Coaching Academy was established in 1999, and is now the world's largest coaching school.
In that time we have trained over 14,000 people to become life coaches.
We are accredited by the International Coach Federation and the Association for Coaching, and we're rated 4.8 out of 5 on Trustpilot.
