FAQ

All my sessions are telecoaching over the phone or through Zoom. We will meet in whichever way you prefer.

Sessions are 50 minutes.

Yes. As a coaching client, the identities and records of coaching clients are strictly confidential, and all coaching sessions take place on a HIPAA-compliant Zoom platform. I am bound to protect your confidentiality by my own desire to provide a space to speak freely and safely and by the Center for Credentialing and Education, the agency that issues and renews board certification for coaches who remain in compliance with its ethical and continuing education requirements.

This link will take you to the CCE Code of Ethics.

The cost depends on which services best meet your needs. We will talk about what you want from coaching, the best ways to achieve your results, and the cost of each option in our consultation call.

Please leave me your contact information in the form on this website or call (402) 915-3292.

I will get back to you within one business day to schedule a free 30-minute consultation.

If we both conclude that coaching with me is the best choice for you, we will schedule our regular sessions.

The key to success in coaching is to have a comfortable “fit” between the client and coach. If one or both of us thinks that you would benefit from working with a different coach or professional service to help you achieve your goals, that is perfectly okay with me. I want you to succeed, so it will be my pleasure to refer you to other providers so you can find that all-important synergy.

A big part of coaching is showing up for yourself and your work and being mindful of the value of time. I expect clients to make coaching a priority and to keep standing appointments. If you fail to cancel a session within 24 hours of the scheduled appointment time, I will charge you for the whole session rate.

It is also important to be on time for coaching sessions to maintain the momentum that a full coaching conversation generates. Sessions end promptly at 50 minutes after the appointed start time. I will move us toward summarizing our conversation and charting progress toward the next session at the 40-minute point, regardless of when the client arrives to start the session.

A coach is an expert guide, a rigorous truth-teller, the person who holds up a mirror, shines a spotlight, creates space for you to express yourself, pushes you to explore all your options, and is your steadfast advocate for attaining the life that you want.

Your goals may emphasize one area of your life, but coaching focuses on you as a whole person and your life as a single experience composed of many mutually influential parts.

A coach is not a cheerleader or a decision-maker. You know better than anyone what is right for you and why the changes you make are to be celebrated. I provide a process of inquiry, enhanced motivation, and accountability so that you can create what you want in your life as thoroughly and efficiently as possible.

My purpose as your coach is to help you explore the entire horizon of possibility for your life and mobilize your strengths and resources to their maximum capacity. You may have what it takes to do this independently, but how many years can you afford to spend figuring it all out?

Coaching can whittle those years down to months when clients commit to the work. And who isn’t ready for more fulfillment, more productivity, and the new opportunities that your self-designed life can present?

Every coaching session is a winning investment in yourself, your work, and your future.

Therapy is a provider-directed treatment for mental health conditions that inhibit our ability to function. Therapy often focuses on exploring the past, and therapists create the treatment plan and lead the client toward pre-established benchmarks for improved health. This process heals pain and brokenness –and thank goodness for it!

Coaching is a client-centered, future-oriented process of building strengths and creating more positive life circumstances. Clients involved in coaching are creative, resourceful, whole, and are highly motivated to envision, pursue, and redesign their lives for increased fulfillment.

The client sets the goals and the benchmarks, and the coach brings the expertise to support them in reaching them quickly and fully.

Imagine that we are talking about your arm: If you were recovering from a painful injury that limits your strength and mobility, you would go to a physical therapist.

If the arm feels good, but you want to build your muscle mass, you seek a personal trainer – or a coach. The physical therapist would primarily focus on rehabilitating the injured arm. The personal trainer would have you lift heavy weights as part of a full-body workout.

You are going to be listened to and heard. I will ask to hear whatever you want to tell me about yourself, your life as it is now, and what you want your life to be. I will ask a few questions that will bring your situation and your vision into a clearer focus.

Mostly, though, I will listen attentively and deeply for things that you might not have noticed in how you talk about your life. You might talk about a recurrent image, an unacknowledged strength, or the way your energy sparks or dims when you mention particular subjects.

From this clearer vista, we will begin to chart your coaching journey by mapping the terrain and marking the distance between where your life is today and where you want it to be. We will decide together how our coaching alliance can best support you in generating momentum as you start your process.

And I will request that you commit to taking one step in your new direction before our next session. It may be very small but will be measurable, achievable, and it will start you on your way.

Each session is a conversation with a strong, consistent arc that promotes insight, clear decision-making, and action. It starts with a review and reflection on your progress toward your goals from the previous session. You set the agenda for the discussion by telling me upon what you would like to focus.

We will explore the issues through a process of skilled inquiry. You will assess what the inquiry has revealed for you and set goals based on what you have discovered and where you want to go from there.

We work together to set substantial, achievable goals before the next session. I will hold you accountable for reaching those goals when we next meet – you can count on it!

Well, yes – But not really.

Yes, every coaching session ends with an agreement about the action steps that you will take.

No, I don’t “assign homework” to my clients the way I assigned essays to my history students. Clients design the action steps and determine which ones they will take before the next session. I have worksheets and exercises to offer if and when those assignments fit your discernment process or action plans.

I do hold clients accountable for keeping the commitments that they make to themselves and their process. But I don’t assign grades.

One of the hallmarks of coaching is that you, the client, are the expert on your own life and the navigator of your process. As your coach, I am your ally on the journey (who knows how to pave the path to make it more pleasant and efficient to travel).

The tools I use to pave the path depend entirely on the roads you decide to travel. You can count on one thing – we will stick to evidence-based methods. Some of the ones that come into use most often include the following:

Positive psychology is a practice of focusing on your positive emotions and existing strengths to support change and enduring fulfillment. Psychologist Martin Seligman developed this as a therapeutic technique. The coaching profession adapted some of its tools to help clients see beyond the obstacles to their vision that tend to be more apparent.

Cognitive-behavioral exercises help identify the automatic thoughts that create self-limiting mindsets and test their validity against the weight of evidence. Over time, this guided inquiry tends to weaken the hardened mindsets that keep you feeling stuck.

Clean language techniques unpack the layered meanings in the words and metaphors you use to talk about your present concerns and your desires for the future. This precision of thought and fullness of expression helps catalyze deep and meaningful self-directed change toward a clearly defined vision. The more clearly you articulate what you want, the better your chances are of attaining it.

Appreciative inquiry works against our bias toward the negative to encourage you to identify and develop the areas working in your life. Studies show that this tends to bring quick early gains that build confidence for the more challenging legs of the coaching journey. Therefore, you can make significant gains and build your confidence more quickly.

I use other assessments like CliftonStrengths (Strengths Finder) and the VIA Strengths Survey, but I use them very sparingly and with clarity of potentially benefitting each client’s coaching process. Assessments that give names to certain tendencies and characteristics can be illuminating. Often, however, they act as labels that become restrictive constructs within one’s mindset.

I discourage clients from labeling themselves.

That is exactly the question I would be asking, too, and I wish I could give you a firm answer. Your process is unique to you and depends on the number and complexity of your goals, your consistent commitment to the work, and how those goals change as you discover new things about yourself and your true desires for your life.

Some people accomplish simple, straightforward goals in six sessions (1-2 months). A more typical number of sessions is 15 (about 5 months). Some people choose to stay in coaching longer if they want to change multiple aspects of their lives. A transformative series of goals can take a year or more of work.

Here is what I can tell you with certainty:

Coaching is results-oriented, not process-oriented, and is designed to be efficient.

Coaching is client-centered, meaning that you can continue sessions for as long as you have goals you want to address, and we will stop when you have attained what you were seeking through coaching. You can always return to coaching in the future if you want.

Your process is unique. I will respect its natural duration and endpoint.

I trained at the Institute for Life Coach Training and am board certified by the National Center for Education and Credentialing. Continuing education is a requirement for recertification and is my natural bent anyway as a lifelong learner.

I logged over 400 hours of coaching experience before starting my practice. I also draw from two decades of experience as an academic advisor, early career mentor, and pre-historic (in the “before graduate school” sense) career as a mental health paraprofessional and crisis intervention counselor.

Coaching is a craft that I continue to hone through continued training with master coaches in evidence-based techniques that will best serve my clients.

Oh, absolutely. Who better to do this when you think about it? Historians are gifted at tracing currents and spotting patterns. And we have a wealth of historical figures’ experience to draw upon for role models. And this particular historian is a board-certified coach.

Nope. I am working on two book projects and a new documentary film while running a separate business as a freelance researcher, writer, and editor. I am a knowledge creator to my core. That will never change.

The odds are excellent that I’m hanging out with my family or friends, playing with my dog, cooking, eating, hiking, practicing yoga, or traveling – I really, really love getting out and exploring the world.

Of course. That’s how I came to see that my career choices were not “either/or” but “both/and.” Instead, the question to ask was, “So hey, Professor, how do you want to do things differently?”

It took a lot of work, but I radically transformed my life in less than a year, and I’m not looking back.

All of them, in this order: Dogs, Beach, Coffee, Mountains, Tea, and Cats (due in part to allergies).