A little history …

The coaching started as a tennis game. His “father”, Timothy Gallwey, born in 1938 in San Francisco, was a tennis player and later the captain of the Harvard University tennis team (1960). Throughout his career, he discovered that traditional methods do not give lasting results in terms of player performance, so he invited his students to focus only on the shots, without using critical thinking or forcing themselves to give the “perfect blow”. Thus, by “calming” critical thinking, analytical self-interference, players were able to capitalize on their natural abilities more easily and at a pace that propelled them to long-term performance.

This discovery led to the appearance of Gallwey’s first book, “The Inner Game of Tennis” which was sold in over 2 million copies. Other books in the “Inner Game” series include applications for golf, skiing, music, work and stress.

 In the years following the release of his first book, readers began to use the “Inner Game” methods in their private, “off-field” lives and Tim began to apply the methods of change from “The Inner Game” to corporate activity to clients such as Apple, Coca Cola, Rolls Royce. Thus, he applied “The Inner Game of coaching” for leadership, sales, change management, teamwork. Gallwey’s work has often been credited both as a foundation for new areas of corporations and for a new sector, “life-coaching.”

Contemporaneous with Gallwey, trained by him at Harvard University and also from the world of sports, Sir John Whitmore founded “The Inner Game” in Great Britain, in 1979, with a small team of coaches with Gallwey as trainer. Initially, they trained tennis players and golfers, but, quite quickly, they transposed the value of “Inner Game” into the business environment for the leaders and managers of organizations. It was Sir John Whitmore who coined the term “performance coaching” – thus the modern coaching movement, as we know it, was born.

The International Coaching Federation (ICF) defines coaching as a “partnership that accelerates the client’s learning pace, performance, personal and professional progress.”

Coaching emphasizes a personal vision, self-evaluation and, especially, self-improvement. Whether you own a company, you are an employee, an athlete, looking for a job or a freelancer, your life is going to change for the better. What you will get: a broader perspective on yourself, your relationships with others and your business, an elaborate vision of a personal mission based on your own values, a clear direction of development.

In coaching, each client is unique, with their own objectives, contexts, life situations. The coach does not offer the client “turnkey” solutions, based on their own experiences, but considers that each client has the answers to their own questions. The “job” of the coach is to support the client in obtaining CLARITY, to highlight the “unseen” aspects of his story, to bring them into the light of consciousness and to observe how the “puzzle” pieces come together in this journey of the self. It is a dance for two, in which each step creates the premises of a fresh vibration, of a new choreography of life. This is done by discovering /rediscovering the client’s internal resources, the fact that he holds the “key”, only the layers that cover it must, one by one, be set aside, at the client’s own pace. “Pole-pole” (lightly) in the language of the Swahili population (Africa).

The main goal of coaching is to fulfill each of us as individuals, on multiple levels (professional, personal, emotional, spiritual, etc.), by defining concrete objectives and identifying the optimal ways to achieve them. It involves a unique professional relationship, in which the coach accompanies the client to set and achieve goals that make sense to him.    

“When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as“ rootless and stemless. ” – Tim Gallwey