Coaching courses

I have been investigating coaching courses. And it’s a long time since I wrote about it (see this post) so I thought I’d share my findings.

I seem to spend lots of time coaching teenagers, after we’ve sorted out their traumas, so that they can manage without me sooner rather than later. A qualification would be nice, though I don’t have a family systems one and seem to facilitate family sessions very well to the extent I need to without any formal qualification – though we did do systems therapy on my original training course. I’m under no illusions that this makes me a family therapist or indeed a coach.

So I went to the website of The Youth Coaching Academy. I have no connection with them at all so what follows is entirely independent. But you may be interested. I was actually looking for something that sounded more ‘me’ than the listed contents of the Oxford Distance Learning College’s Diploma in Child Coaching – mind you, that’s based on a ‘feeling’ about it in relation to my needs and is in no way intended to be detrimental. Mostly, in fact, because I couldn’t get them to distinguish between their two levels of course.

Back at the Youth Coaching Academy, I downloaded the audio of a module free – you might like to do the same; it’s 90 minutes, so it will take a while. Harry Singha certainly knows what he is talking about, although the first 8 minutes of the MP3 were rather ditzy as his interviewers introduced themselves!

The jury is out on the prospective value of the course as I haven’t enrolled – but in its favour is the fact that to get one of the three levels of certification you have to do recordings of ever more live sessions with clients. That’s good. No skiving off on theory alone. Their content sounds really good as well. (Why does winter always make me think of wood fires and cosy studying??) By the way, if anyone is wanting a school to have trained peer coaches, this academy runs courses for those too.

The other contender for youth coaching would appear to be the Youth Impact Coaching Course run by The Coaching Academy. Harry Singha makes an appearance on one of their live training sessions too, but he actually founded the Youth Coaching Academy and belongs there these days. The Youth Impact course is expensive, even by course standards but might well be good otherwise.

One thing Harry S said was about “credible adults”. Now that’s something we all understand. He said that if abused children believe all adults are bad, when they grow up to be one, they don’t like themselves. So they do all sorts of anti-social things and are equally happy if they die because they don’t care about their lives. When we, as therapists (or coaches or teachers) care, we provide a reference point that adults can be caring – and then they thrive.

This is illustrated in a tiny way by a client the other day who has had three sessions with gaps so far (not my fault!) – and when I said I’d see him next week, his face lit up and he said, “Two on end. Brilliant.” And I knew then that despite the breaks, I had that essential link so necessary before further work can be done and he can thrive. Thus far has been nurture, the next stretch is therapy, the final stretch will be brief coaching before setting him free – I expect you understand my passion for this process! We love kids.