The “OUTSIDE” Coaching Model

A Coaching Model By Ioan-Andrei Chirila, Young Professionals Coach, SWITZERLAND

The “OUTSIDE”

This is written for you, as a potential client, to provide an idea of what and how I’ll be partnering with you in this coaching relationship, to enable both of us to have clarity of the process.

This is something for you if, as you stand and read these lines, you feel like you’re endlessly running in a hamster wheel, catering to day-to-day life challenges, without feeling that you’re getting anywhere. You’re doing your day-to-day job fine, you’re getting along fine with your family and people around you, and all in all, one might speak about you as a successful person, but you feel like you’re missing something, a higher purpose, a reason for waking up happy every day and you feel sometimes empty. This coaching model invites you to think outside of the box, focusing on you, your interests, and your desires and enabling you to take advantage of everything you’ve been gifted with to fully enjoy your life and reach your potential.

The “OUTSIDE” Coaching Model

OUTSIDE stands for:

• Outcome – what do you want?
• Understanding – who you are?
• Transformation – partner to find out how we can get to where you want to be.
• Start – where are you right now?
• Ideal – what would be your ideal self doing right now?
• Dedication – to yourself, to your growth.
• Experiment – small steps, taking you in the right direction.

The starting point of this coaching relationship is your desire to change something – getting outside of the busy life and taking more control of yourself, and your time, making you a happier and fulfilled person, after your interpretation of happier and fulfilled, not mine, not your partner’s and not of the people around us.

Your desire to change something is also the starting point of the OUTSIDE model, the outcome, keeping the spirit of the ICF’s definition of a coaching relationship:

… partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential …^[1]

You, as the client, are the expert and know best: what should be the outcome of your coaching? What are you trying to do? It is perfectly fine if you don’t have a clear outcome from the start: we can work together to uncover it, and, at any point in time, you can change what the outcome should be. The purpose is to enable you, as a client, to see and assess progress, and to have an overarching goal through the sessions, even if session by session we might be discussing a current, and possibly totally unrelated, problem.

I recognize you as a whole and naturally resourceful person, not needing fixing^[2], and rely on your understanding of yourself, who you are, and what drives you in order to fuel the coaching process and to build an awareness of who you really are. Without a good understanding of yourself, it’s extremely hard to create sustainable change^[3]. Discovering what’s important for you, what you value, and what principles you stand for, sets up a very solid foundation for a durable transformation.

With the outcome and the understanding of who you are clear to both of us, we can work together to effect the transformation. What I do is guide you, through deep listening, powerful questions, and observations. What you’re going to do is be fully engaged in the relationship, open, and willing to try things out, as they come. At times, it might be the case that I notice an underlying belief or incomplete information and I might follow up with suggestions to, for example, read an article or watch a video, at the end of a session. While during the session we’re both present and doing our best to follow up, there is no magic involved in coaching and the entire process takes time, with a lot of the work happening between the sessions. The awareness you gain in the session needs time to sink in and enable you to act on it, building slowly toward your desired outcome.

In each of the sessions, we’ll start from where you are, you’ll be defining what your ideal self would be or have and we’ll apply your dedication to yourself and your growth to set up experiments, to get you step by step closer to where you want to be. We’ll be keeping in mind all the time the understanding of yourself, what’s important to you, and how that ties in with the overall outcome that we initially discussed in the first meeting. And if, on the way, you discover that you’re interested in another outcome, that’s just fine: we’re going to discuss and refocus on your desired outcome.

The fact that you’re reading this model shows you’re open to change and willing to change something – you value yourself as a person and are interested in growing. Sometimes this growth might be uncomfortable and I’ll be pushing you outside of your comfort zone, using experiments and challenges. You’ll define how the ideal you would handle a particular situation, and we’ll set up experiments together to bridge that gap. Out of every try, we’ll discover something: sometimes things that you might be willing to keep, sometimes things that you’d rather not do again, as they’re not fully aligned with you as a person, but every experience would be handled as a learning opportunity, and such would hopefully bring more understanding into who you are, and possibly open up new ways of things to try to get to where you want to be.

At every point of the process, you’re in charge, to enable you to take even more control of your life. By identifying and defining the outcome, you take control of the direction you’re going. By understanding yourself, you build the foundation for durable changes in yourself. You take advantage of your dedication to yourself, your growth, and change to set up experiments – which may succeed or may fail, but would continue to build up into your understanding of yourself until you reach the desired goal.

References

[1] Coaching definition as present on the ICF website (https://coachingfederation.org/about) as of May 2023.
[2] Co-Active Coaching, 4th edition by Henry Kimsey-House, Karen Kimsey-House, Phillip Sandahl, Laura Withworth, ISBN 978-1-47367-498-1 – Chapter 1: The Co-Active Model, page 4.
[3] The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Infographics Edition by Stephen R. Covey, ISBN 978-1-63353-310-3, page 38.