Personal Consultancy
Personal Consultancy in Kendal & South Lakes
What is personal consultancy?
Personal Consultancy is a way of working and helping, a “model” if you will, that I’ve recently become very interested in. I believe that my experience and skills have brought me to this naturally and I believe I’ve already worked in this way; I just didn’t realise it had a label. It enables me to offer all of my experience and to be there for you as fully as possible.
What Personal Consultancy enables us to do is combine counselling with coaching. There’s space to work on the present, your job or your relationships, but also on the past, for example your childhood or a past traumatic event. It means we can work together in a coaching way - developing your strength, confidence and achieving a particular goal or in more of a counselling context - helping you to understand your past and “fix your foundations”; bringing into awareness things which have previously been denied or distorted and now might be getting in your way. I’ve found that there is a considerable overlapping of the two disciplines, and I feel privileged to be able to work in such an inclusive way.
A bit more about Personal Consultancy
Personal Consultancy is a way of helping that originated from the work of 2 practitioners, Nash Popovic and Debra Jinks (Personal Consultancy – a model for integrating counselling and coaching 2014) and provides a way to bring together coaching and counselling. In my work with clients who are often struggling with a career or professional issue our conversations often start from a coaching perspective. However, quite often the work deepens, and the relationship can shift into what most people would understand a counselling relationship to be. So, it’s a way in which coaching, and counselling can integrate and I believe I can offer the best of myself within this approach. It doesn’t really matter what the label or the title is, provided it helps, then I’m happy to leave others to argue over which model or theory it falls under. I also don’t believe that clients are very interested at all in labels or “schools” of therapy. Clients are always the best people to know what helps them.
Having trained in person centred counselling I’m a firm believer that the approach is consistent with the personal consultancy model in that person-centred therapy has at its core the belief that people can fulfil their own potential and be helped with their personal development; it is a very positive approach. This is very definitely comparable to work undertaken within the context of a coaching relationship; coaching generally is defined by the process of facilitating improvements in a persons’ performance and growth. It’s probably more goal orientated but I have found that clients respond to having some kind of goal to work towards, to know when they embark on a relationship (counselling or coaching) that there’s a loose plan in place, a road map to work with and I will talk to you about what you want from therapy, what might work for you and what doesn’t work or isn’t working. This will be part of the on-going conversation between us. We can share decision making and in this way work together to get you much closer to where you want to be.
So what's the first step?
I will always offer a first meeting to help us discuss whether you want to start counselling with me and whether I am the best person to help you or whether another person would be better suited to you. We’ll discuss how counselling might help you and the issues which you want to begin to talk about so that we can agree, between us, on a way of working, bearing in mind my person-centred approach and the reasons that might bring you to counselling.
Everything we discuss is completely confidential with total respect for your privacy and that of any other individuals discussed.