Coaching

Helping women move from financial stress to financial success.

Financial & Business Coaching

 

I use a practical, hands-on approach to helping you reduce debt and begin saving to achieve your life goals. The coaching process is intended to be short-term and goal-directed. I will help you identify core money beliefs; change patterns of thinking or behavior that underlie your financial difficulties, and so change the way you feel about money. My approach works by changing your attitudes and behaviors about money. We focus on your thoughts, images, beliefs and attitudes about money. We identify how these processes influence your behavior and then actively work to change the behaviors.

What is Coaching?

Coaching is a relationship between coach and client that is collaborative, systematic, strengths-based, and focused on solutions and results.

As a coach, I help you set goals, define the short-term and intermediate-term steps to achieve these goals, increase motivation to implement the steps, and monitor and provide feedback on performance. I help you develop skills and behaviors that you can improve upon once the coaching relationship ends.

The Roles of a Coach:

Empowerment
to identify goals that reflect your values and implement your intentions.

Accountability
to hold you accountable & provide support to help you achieve your goals.

Behavior Change
to provide encouragement and feedback so you can stay on track.

I use strategies and techniques grounded in scientific evidence as the foundation for the coaching process. I apply concepts from the fields of positive psychology, cognitive psychology, coaching psychology, solution-focused therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy.

I provide coaching in the areas of personal finance, female-owned small business, career development, and retirement transition. My primary focus is on financial coaching because good financial management is a key component in each of these areas.

Financial Coaching

Financial coaching is a strategy to help women improve their financial well-being.

What is Financial Coaching? Financial coaching is a strategy to help women improve their financial well-being. Financial coaching is a collaborative, solution-focused relationship that empowers women to achieve financial freedom. Financial coaching uses techniques from positive psychology and behavioral finance to facilitate behavior change. Financial coaching uses coaching techniques to develop a client’s capability to manage her own finances and sustain economic security that is congruent with her values and goals. Common goals include saving for an emergency, eliminating debt, making a major purchase like a house, starting a business, or funding retirement.

How is Financial Coaching Different From Other Services? Financial coaching is different from financial education, financial planning, and financial counseling. A financial coach does not focus on conveying financial knowledge, like a financial educator. A financial coach does not provide expert financial advice, like a financial planner. A financial coach does not provide help or intervention for clients in financial crisis, like a financial counselor. The coaching process evolves over weeks or months, where financial education, financial planning, and financial counseling may occur in just a few hours, in a single evening, or over a few weeks.

What is the Role of a Financial Coach? As a financial coach, I can see what the client cannot. I hold clients accountable to practice sound financial management and provide them guidance, support, and motivation to help them reach their financial goals. The client is assumed to be creative, resourceful, and motivated to grow, yet may need help drawing on these positive qualities. I provide structure for clients to develop solutions.

While I am not an expert in financial issues, I do have extensive experience in skills like active listening, motivational interviewing, and performance monitoring. I will help you overcome your behavioral failings, especially self-control problems, procrastination, and focusing attention. You will acquire the skills to help you achieve long-term financial security and mobility by growing emergency savings, building credit, reducing debt, and saving for retirement.

Financial Coaching Process

What should I expect from financial coaching? Initially, we will focus on personal financial management. Then, I will help you articulate goals for your future. I will provide structure for you to practice new financial behaviors and offer feedback so you can become more financially capable. You will experience reduced stress related to managing your finances and an increase in self-confidence. We can meet face-to-face, usually over a period of 3 to 6 months, meeting weekly initially and less often as you improve your financial behaviors. We can meet by phone or online.

Session 1: Assessment

complete and review tests that identify strengths, values, and challenges. Identify behavioral outcomes.

Session 2: Identify Goals

clarify vision of success, collaboratively set goals, and brainstorm strategies to achieve the goals.

Session 3: Action Plan

identify concrete, actionable steps with a realistic timeline.

Session 4: Motivation Enhancement

build on identified strengths, manage road blocks, and increase capability.

Session 5 and beyond: Progress Monitoring and Evaluation

measure progress and refine or change goals.

Final Session: Process Review

explore positive and negative aspects of coaching process and ensure that behavior change sticks.

How is Financial Coaching Different From Other Services? Financial coaching is different from financial education, financial planning, and financial counseling. A financial coach does not focus on conveying financial knowledge, like a financial educator. A financial coach does not provide expert financial advice, like a financial planner. A financial coach does not provide help or intervention for clients in financial crisis, like a financial counselor. The coaching process evolves over weeks or months, where financial education, financial planning, and financial counseling may occur in just a few hours, in a single evening, or over a few weeks.

What is the Role of a Financial Coach? As a financial coach, I can see what the client cannot. I hold clients accountable to practice sound financial management and provide them guidance, support, and motivation to help them reach their financial goals. The client is assumed to be creative, resourceful, and motivated to grow, yet may need help drawing on these positive qualities. I provide structure for clients to develop solutions.

While I am not an expert in financial issues, I do have extensive experience in skills like active listening, motivational interviewing, and performance monitoring. I will help you overcome your behavioral failings, especially self-control problems, procrastination, and focusing attention. You will acquire the skills to help you achieve long-term financial security and mobility by growing emergency savings, building credit, reducing debt, and saving for retirement.

Business Coaching

Business coaching is a process that can help take your business from where it is to where you want it to be.

The coaching process can:

  • Assist and guide you in growing your business by helping clarify your vision and how it fits with your personal goals and values.
  • Challenge you to move from a place of stagnation to one of growth.
  • Help you broaden your business awareness
  • Help you develop an action plan and support you as you implement it.

Who Would Benefit from Business Coaching? Self-employed women entrepreneurs, small business owners, solo entrepreneurs, and creatives who have chosen to start their own microenterprises by choice or necessity. Women-owned firms now account for 36% of all businesses.

Business coaching can help if you:

  • Have a great business idea but are unsure if you’re cut out for entrepreneurship.
  • Want to join the growing ranks of women who want to transform their hobby or “side hustle” into a small business.
  • Are a Millennial who works as a freelancer from a remote office.
  • Are a late-career woman who has decided to take the leap, start a small business, and become an “encore entrepreneur.”

Why Women? Coaching and consulting are pathways for me to help women become economically independent, financially savvy, and to inspire women to help each other.

I had my first “real” job interview, for a part-time retail position, when I was 16. The interviewer, a middle-aged white man, asked what I would do if my boss asked me to sit on his lap. I recall feeling confused and surprised by the question, in addition to a flood of other emotions I couldn’t name at the time. My answer: I would refuse, of course. Thankfully, I didn’t get the job. That experience was the first of many I would encounter in my professional and personal life. Much has changed for women but much work remains to be done to bring about equality.

Each of my professional and educational experiences has taught me new lessons, increasing my confidence and the ability to assert myself. Owning a small business has been the most influential experience to date. My success depended on my ability to manage all financial aspects of the business, in addition to the myriad of other skills I had to learn. Entrepreneurship has inspired me to help other women expand their vision of themselves. I want to help other women embrace the power that comes from taking ownership of their financial lives. Women who confidently manage their finances have the power to positively influence their families, workplaces, and communities.

While women have made gains, both in the workplace and in entrepreneurship, we still make less than men and this difference costs us over our lifetimes. Women are more likely to step out of the workforce to raise children or care for family members, which reduces earning power, retirement contributions, and contributions to Social Security. Women live longer and are more likely to experience poverty in old age. Women tend to save and invest less and are more likely to be dissatisfied with the financial services industry. Women need to talk about money more and they need to be more intentional about money decisions. When women are engaged, educated, and empowered, they are just as good, if not better, than men at financial management.