Coaching
Helps you think, examine your assumptions and reach your own answer.
Useful when the situation is yours, the constraints are yours, and no external expert can know it well enough to decide for you.
This is the service offered here.
ICF Coaching
A structured conversation, built to move your own thinking.
Coaching is a specific professional discipline with its own standards and its own method. It is worth understanding what it is before you buy it, and equally worth knowing what it is not.
The method
What coaching actually is
Professional coaching, in the approach set out by the ICF (International Coaching Federation), is a partnership. The coach does not arrive with the answer. The coach creates the conditions in which you can find yours: by listening closely, asking questions you would not ask yourself, reflecting back what you are actually saying, and holding the conversation steady when it becomes uncomfortable.
The underlying assumption is not flattery. It is that you already hold most of what is needed to decide well in your own situation, and that what is missing is usually structured attention rather than more input. You know your organisation, your people, your constraints and your own tolerance for risk better than anyone coming to your situation from the outside.
What a coach adds is a process that is difficult to run on yourself: separating the decision from the anxiety around it, testing assumptions you stopped noticing, and making the trade you are actually facing visible enough to choose between.
Three different things
Coaching, mentoring, consulting
These are often used interchangeably in the market. They are not the same purchase, and confusing them is the most common reason people are disappointed by one of them.
Mentoring
Shares the experience and judgement of someone who has walked a similar path.
Useful when you want to learn from how a specific person handled a specific kind of situation before you.
Consulting
Provides expertise, analysis and a recommendation for you to implement.
Useful when the gap is genuinely knowledge or capacity, and you want someone to bring the answer.
In this service I work as a coach. Not as a consultant, and not as a mentor. If during the work it becomes clear that what you need is advice or expertise, I will say so directly, and you can decide where to get it.
In practice
How a session works
You bring one situation
Not a status update on everything. One decision, one relationship, one pattern. The narrower the entry point, the further the hour goes.
You agree what would make the hour worth it
A few minutes at the start, spent on what you want to be different by the end. This is what keeps the conversation from becoming a pleasant, useless catch up.
You think out loud, with structure
Questions, reflection, and occasional friction. Expect to be asked what you are avoiding, what you are assuming, and what you would do if the constraint you named was not there.
You leave with something you decided
Sometimes an action. Sometimes a clear decision not to act yet, which is a legitimate outcome and often the more difficult one to reach.
Standards
Confidentiality and professional practice
Confidentiality. What is said in a session stays in the session. Nothing is shared with an employer, a sponsor or anyone else. Where an organisation is paying for coaching, the scope of any reporting is agreed in writing with you before the work begins, and it never includes session content.
Professional standards. I work to the ethical standards and core competencies of the ICF, the professional body for coaching. In practice that means a clear coaching agreement, an explicit boundary between coaching and other services, and a commitment to say openly if coaching is not the right instrument for what you are facing.
Credential. I hold the ACC credential from the ICF and have more than 170 hours of coaching experience. I am a member of the ICF and of its Czech chapter, the ICF Czech Republic Charter Chapter. A credential is not a guarantee of fit. It is evidence that the practice is trained, assessed and accountable to a professional body rather than self declared.
Limits. Coaching is not therapy and is not a substitute for it. Where a situation calls for psychological or medical support, I will say so plainly.
Expectations
What this is not
- Not business consulting. You will not receive a market analysis or a recommendation deck.
- Not mentoring. The work is your thinking, not a transfer of someone else's playbook.
- Not therapy, and not a clinical service.
- Not motivational. There is no pep talk, and no promise of transformation.
- Not a course, a membership or a community. It is a conversation, and it ends when it is done.
Practical questions
- Do I need a discovery call first?
- No. A single session is designed to stand on its own. You book, you pay, you arrive with your situation. If you prefer to talk before committing to the six session program, book a single session and decide afterwards.
- What do I need to prepare?
- Come with a situation that is genuinely occupying you. It does not have to be a polished brief. Nothing else needs preparing.
- How long is a session and where does it happen?
- 50 minutes, online, by video.
- Will I be given advice?
- Not as the method. Coaching works by helping you think, not by handing you a recommendation. If at some point what you need is genuinely expertise rather than coaching, that will be said openly rather than blurred.
- What if the situation involves people I cannot name?
- You can describe roles and dynamics without names. And nothing said in a session goes any further.
- How many sessions do people usually take?
- It varies. A specific decision often resolves in one. A change in how you operate, a new role, or a pattern you keep repeating usually benefits from the six session program.
Free. One email, nothing else
10 Questions Worth Asking Before Your Next Important Decision
Ten questions I actually use in coaching sessions with senior leaders. They help when a decision will not settle and more analysis is not moving it.
- What am I actually deciding, and what am I only worrying about?
- Which of my constraints are real, and which have I inherited?
- What would I advise a colleague I respect to do here?