Expanded States Coaching

Coaching is a collaborative partnership that supports your personal and professional development. Unlike therapy, which often focuses on healing the past, or consulting, which provides expert advice, coaching creates a space to unlock meaningful growth and navigate life’s complexities with more wisdom, resourcefulness, and creativity.

In a coaching relationship, we work together to deepen your self-awareness, expand your perspectives, and help you discover fresh ways to approach challenges.

Coaching is not:

• Giving advice or telling you what to do

• Sharing expertise from personal experience

• Problem-solving on your behalf

• Providing therapy or counselling

• Analysing past events to heal trauma

• Following rigid systems or formulas

While both coaching and therapy can support personal growth, they serve different purposes.

Therapy is essential for:

• Addressing mental health conditions

• Working through trauma

• Managing serious addiction

• Processing significant emotional burdens

Clinical applications are outside the scope of coaching.

Coaching is appropriate for:

• Cultivating emotional intelligence

• Exploring meaning and purpose

• Deepening qualities such as presence, wisdom, and compassion

• Aligning actions with your deeepest values and aspirations

• Discovering fresh and creative ways to navigate life’s complexities

• Cultivating happiness and well-being

In principle, therapy can also support these same goals. You might be drawn to coaching because:

• The collaborative and less formal nature of the coaching relationship resonates

• You want to explicitly focus on development

• The methodology used by the coach appeals

• The coach has a specific skillset that aligns with your needs

• The coaching container feels right for your current journey

Many people invest in books, courses, and programs for personal development. While these resources provide valuable knowledge and insights, there's often a gap between understanding concepts intellectually and embodying real change in your life - what's known as the "knowing-doing gap."

Coaching offers something fundamentally different from self-study:

• Skilled support in working with what's emerging in real-time

• Help in recognising and working with parts of yourself that may resist change

• Guidance in moving from intellectual understanding to embodied knowing

• Partnership in following threads of development that may be hard to navigate alone

• Support in staying with and deepening into challenging experiences that you might otherwise avoid

Beyond these practical benefits, the coaching relationship provides a unique space where fundamental psychological needs can be met in fresh ways:

• Being truly seen and understood

• Feeling "I'm not alone in this"

• Experiencing your impact and capability

• Being constructively challenged to grow

• Discovering who you uniquely are

• Having your experience deeply acknowledged

Your sense of self, others, and the world unfolds through relationship. Since life itself happens in relationship - with others, with work, with challenges - real development often needs a space where new possibilities can emerge through genuine human connection. The coaching relationship provides this space, offering both practical guidance and the conditions for natural growth to emerge.

Many clients find they make breakthroughs in coaching conversations that hadn't occurred despite years of self-study and courses. This is because the unique conditions of the coaching relationship support deeper insight and transformation.