Meet Dr. Leah

Coaching is a non-directive, person-centered, strength-based, collaborative support service to help functional clients achieve meaningful goals. Coaching provides an expert layer of social support for clients seeking to maximize their personal and professional potential. Coaching emphasizes the client’s autonomy, choice, and trust in themselves.

Clients come to coaching with an interest in self-improvement or measurable progress. Through coaching, clients identify resources, find actionable insights and generate tailored strategies to work toward goals more effeciently and effecitvely. The coach guides and supports the client’s planned, intentional, and purposeful action toward achievement.

Coaching clients are ready, willing, and able to do the work inherent in the coaching process. They are committed to achieving the outcomes they seek.

What is evidence-based coaching?

I offer behavioral science and qualitative research expertise honed through doctoral study. My training and coaching interventions are supported by coaching-specific and coaching-relevant research from the psychology, neuroscience, health and wellness literature.

I am a qualitative researcher. My favorite thing about coaching is that it can be considered a personal research and development project. You, the client, are the subject and your needs and goals inform your personal project. The coaching process involves iterative human-centered design and an experiential learning cycle.

• Discover - As your coach, I am your research partner who is skilled in facilitating your discovery process to understand yourself, your situation, and your blind spots better. I serve as your objective observer aiding in the data gathering that contributes to understanding.

• Understand - Deeper and broader understanding offer opportunities to generate tailored strategies and solutions that fit. We brainstorm those solutions together integrating new insights and awareness from each session.

• Create - I facilitate your process of turning those insights into action plans, which serve as behavior experiments in the experiential learning process.

• Implement - You commit to following through on applying the action plans, completing the experiment between our sessions. Notice what worked, what didn’t, and report your findings in our next session.

• Assess - We discuss your experience in each follow-up session. I facilitate your reflection to identify what went well, what didn’t, what to keep, and what to tweak. We generate your next iteration and you get back out and implement.

We repeat this cycle as many times as necessary for a single goal and restart it on each next goal. Most clients identify 1-2 high priority goals for the coaching engagement.

Coaches and therapists share a common goal – to enhance well-being and outcomes for those they serve. Some therapists are also coaches. Some coaches are also therapists. Deciding which is the best fit for the client depends on their current state of functioning and their needs and goals. Keep in mind, the same client may work with a therapist and a coach to address different needs and goals - if the client's clinical issue is well-managed. The therapist may work with the client to address the clinical issue, such as depression, while the coach works with the client around goals that matter to ongoing progress, such as finding clarity around career direction, or building job or academic skills. Here’s an overview of the primary differences:

Functioning on the Wellness Continuum

Think of wellness on a continuum with the mid-point as 0 representing normal functioning. Negative numbers are to the left of 0 and represent dysfunction. Positive numbers are to the right of 0 and represent thriving. Therapy addresses dysfunction with the goal of bringing clients back to normal functioning (0). Coaching takes functional clients from 0 into positive numbers to thriving. Therapy tends to be a better fit for those experiencing moderate to severe levels of distress or dysfunction because therapists have the clinical training, qualifications, and government sanctions to diagnose and treat issues that would otherwise interfere with the client's progress. Coaches who have completed an accredited professional coach training and certification program (credentialed coaches) may also serve as an early intervention support for those who are experiencing low levels of distress or dysfunction.

Credentialed coaches are qualified to help functional clients take a proactive role in their lives, to begin setting and working toward goals to learn to thrive by doing, because we all hit setbacks in life. If we accept just okay (normal functioning) we remain consistently at-risk of falling into dysfunction and dependence. If we remain proactive, working toward thriving (positive numbers) and hit setbacks we’re still better than okay. We’re also better equipped to bounce back and continue the forward momentum.

Client's Needs

Therapy

• The patient is struggling with dysfunction related to psychological issues, concerns, or symptoms that interfere with daily tasks.

• The patient needs help coping, alleviating pain, or distress related to trauma, disorders, or illness.

• The patient wants to work through the problems and get back to normalcy

• The patient is looking for a mental health professional to help them overcome and live well again.

Coaching

• The client is functional and does fine with daily tasks.

• The client is considered psychologically normal and copes well enough.

• The client wants to be better, grow, or set and achieve higher goals.

• The client wants to improve performance, relationships, or life satisfaction.

• The client is looking for a success partner to help facilitate the next level of growth, advancement, or change.

We promote thriving together

Therapists often refer clients to coaches as a next level of support. Therapists help clients get back to normalcy and begin moving onto thriving. Coaches can pick up the work from there to support clients as they continue to set and achieve meaningful goals and build skills for ongoing success.