The most important ‘tool’ you have as a coach is the ‘use of self’. This requires that you be prepared to examine your inner landscape—your own self-development—in order to build the capacity to coach.

Our Self-as-Coach model provides a way of scanning your inner landscape to determine what’s most needed with the client and with one’s self at any given time, and it provides a map for your own developmental journey toward mastery.

At Hudson we believe that to be an effective coach, you need to understand how to look at the developmental pathways of your client—the Whole Person. This includes the developmental pathway across one’s lifespan as well as the internal pathway that evolves as the individual moves through transitions and changes. These two elements of development encompass and account for the context in which we live while simultaneously acknowledging that we are all on an individual journey in life.

Whether coaching a leader at the peak of his career, an early career person looking to define her own path, or a successful midcareer leader who is burned out and bored, it’s essential that we understand the developmental terrain in all contexts in order to effect sustainable change for clients.

A sound coaching methodology provides a map to guide the way through the coaching process, yet a useful methodology is not intended to be lockstep and linear; coaching never unfolds in quite that way. Every coaching situation dictates the need for flexibility, and some elements of the methodology will be more important in some situations than in others.

Whether your coaching engagement is inside an organization or transition coaching work, our flexible methodology supports the progression from understanding the context to identifying the coaching goals, and working the inner and outer elements that create sustainable change—and measurable results.

The measurement of coaching outcomes is imperative if coaching is going to continue to grow as a viable mechanism for developing leaders. Our coaches learn how to evaluate the coaching engagement from several different angles so they can communicate the wider impact the coaching engagement has had on the organization and its bottom line.