Coaching FAQs

  • People strive to enjoy the highest quality of life possible. They yearn to live with purpose and meaning. They want to know that their life has value. Coaching brings sharp focus to what’s purposeful and meaningful to you. It provides space for you to explore what’s most fulfilling to you, and strengthens you to create and live the life you dream of – today.

    Coaches don’t tell people what to do. It is not advice-based. Rather, coaching helps you clarify and control your life. Coaching allows you to examine what you’re doing right now in your life, and how your choices and actions match your goals, dreams, values, and intentions. You’ll uncover new choices that lead to real change. Coaching helps you go beyond any mental blocks that limit what you thought was possible.

    Coaching is a Partnership. Coaching works as a partnership between the coach and client. It helps to identify and clarify your true goals, making them challenging and motivating. Coaching then creates the space and energy you need to achieve those goals aligned with your deepest values, and ultimately design the life you truly desire.

    Coaching incorporates a number of principles:

    • All human beings dream of fulfilling themselves and they deserve the opportunity to be their best.

    • People create their life experience and a coach can help a client to create the life that they want.

    • Intellectual understanding is not enough. Change means taking action.

    • There is no such thing as failure. If you do not get what you want, you find another way. Failure is just a short-term way of saying that you have not succeeded – yet.

    • Everyone is naturally whole, resourceful–equipped with all the resources they need–and creative. No one is helpless. The client has the answers; the coach has the questions.

    • A coach works to increase the awareness, clarity, and choice in the client’s life.

    • Coaching is an equal, synergistic partnership.

    The term "coaching" was first used in sports for a person who helped an athlete train and improve. All top athletes have a personal coach. From there, the idea spread to all walks of life. A significant event in this expansion was the publication of Timothy Gallwey’s book, The Inner Game of Tennis. This book used ideas from sports coaching in a much broader way.

  • Executive Coaching

    Coaching for top-level management to improve strategic decision-making and leadership.

    Business coaching

    Business coaches coach people in their work on professional issues. They often work with managers inside a company and may also coach teams.

    Team Coaching

    Many coaches specialize in coaching business teams. These coaches help teams to give their best, helping them to work smoothly and effectively.

    Life coaching

    A life coach deals with the client’s life in all its dimensions – personal and professional, health, and relationships. Often life coaches will help a client in their work, because work is an important part of life, but their focus is not wholly on work.

    A life coach is the only professional trained to deal with all aspects of a client’s life.

    Career coaching

    A career coach specializes in coaching people who want to find a job, change career, or get back into the job market after a break from work.

    Parental coaching

    Coaches specializing with parental issues help create new options for parent-child relationships that ultimately reduce stress and increase the trust and quality in those relationships.

    Wellness coaching

    Coaching helps clients find the motivation and create structure to reach their physical and emotional health goals.

    Those goals might include:

    • Lose a few pounds

    • Eat better

    • Quit smoking

    • Quit alcohol consumption (sobriety coaching)

    • Lower stress

    Unlike a nutritionist or physical therapist, who makes specific diet and exercise suggestions, a wellness coach will help you make better general choices that fit your lifestyle.

    Coaching does not create dependency. The coach wants the client to be autonomous and achieve what they want. They make it clear from the start that the client is responsible for and owns the results of the coaching. Coaching works to make the client more self reliant, not less so.   

    Can coaching be dangerous? That is not possible. A coach does not provide therapeutic services, and will refer the client to another qualified professional if that ever becomes necessary. The coach-client relationship can be redesigned or terminated at any time.

    The International Coaching Federation (ICF) posts its Code of Ethics page which all member coaches follow. For more information about the ICF Code of Ethics, see Ethical Standards in Coaching.

  • A coach will help you to explore the present and design the future you want. Coaching enables you to achieve your goals and live your values. As a coach, I’ll use different tools and techniques designed to help you discover your core values, dreams, and life purpose. Often there’s work that I’ll design with you to be completed between coaching sessions. Transformation occurs over the course of the coaching engagement.

    You decide together with the coach how often the sessions will be, what form they will take (for example by video call, telephone, and/or face to face) and the duration of the coaching arrangement (for example, three or six months). Different coaches will suggest different arrangements. 

    Coaching provides clarity to clients about what they want from life. Clients will then have the energy and structures they need to focus on their goals with passion, because they have cleared away the obstacles that blocked them.

    Clients will have a more satisfying and fulfilling life in every aspect. Professionally, they’ll be more effective and skilled at their work and achieve better results.

    Coaching is a long-term investment in higher business performance. It is the most cost-effective method of achieving higher performance from key individuals. Coaching is evidence of the company’s commitment to developing its people and contributes to a supportive organizational culture with high morale.

    Coaching retains key employees and avoids:

    • The cost of retraining

    • The loss of company knowledge to competitors

    • The drop in productivity when employees leave 

    Coaching is gaining popularity in business because it’s one of the most cost-effective ways of helping people and organizations become more effective. It demonstrates the business’s commitment to their employees which can reduce attrition, avoiding costly recruitment and retraining.

    It is growing more popular now because people expect to be able to do more, and fulfill their mental, emotional, financial, and spiritual dreams and goals. A coach helps people to do just that. As your coach, I am committed to your advancement and well-being.

  • Everyone and anyone. Organizations hire coaches to improve teamwork, to coach executives, and upskill their managers. Individuals hire coaches to improve their lives, their relationships, and their general happiness. 

    You can find a coach to hire by going to the International Coaching Federation database and searching for a coach in your area.

    The cost for coaching varies considerably from country to country and it also depends on the coach’s specialty. Ask the coach you want to engage to explain their fees.

Services and Approach

  • We love working with groups who align with our approach. In particular, we strive to actively name and grapple with white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, imperialism, and patriarchy as systems of oppression past and present. We are not a good fit for groups that have limits on what can be discussed or introduced when building an analysis of systemic oppression. Please visit this page for more information on who we work with.

  • We ask all groups to begin by scheduling a consultation. This gives us the chance to learn more about the context of your group, share recommendations for next steps and how we might approach your specific situation, and see if working together would be a good match. This gives you an opportunity to get to know us, ask us questions about your organizational process in general, and see if working together would be a good match.

Sliding Scale, Labor, and Payment

  • At KarenM, we use sliding scales for our services to both make them accessible for those with lower incomes & wealth and to center our values and politics on redistribution. Often, sliding scales emphasize the accessibility for those who can’t afford full pay on one end of the scale without calling into question the perceived normalcy of being able to afford to pay the full rate. We believe in building an economy that doesn’t normalize wealth disparities and acknowledges the centuries of labor exploitation, slavery of Black people, violence, and resource extraction on which today’s economy and the wealth (particularly of white Americans) has been built. We believe in a solidarity economy, one that centers racial and economic justice, and is based on care for all and not profit for some. We recognize that, under racial capitalism, where individuals and organizations find themselves on the economic ladder is not based in justice. We are an organization striving to be anti-capitalist in a capitalist system, to articulate the value of the labor we offer while working to make it accessible and just within a system that values cheap products, devalues feminized labor, and extracts wealth. We are in process on this and will continue to shift and tweak our methods with new learnings.

    In order to practice our values and work towards building a solidarity economy, we practice redistribution internally and ask that our clients engage critically with this practice as well. We guarantee our facilitators get paid a fair hourly rate and our partners receive payment for their services that align with our relative privilege and marginalization, regardless of the composition of a workshop and/or the rate tier of a client we contract with. Redistribution rates ensure we can offer solidarity rates and donation based programming for BIPOC, and contribute funds to Black & Indigenous-led organizing where we live without devaluing the labor of our partners.

    A note about valuing labor

    We invite you to examine your sense of monetary value for different products and services. Many of us have been taught to shop around for the cheapest price with the best ‘value’ - but what do we really mean by that? How are we assigning worth to different kinds of labor? Like many who work in sectors with feminized labor, we experience people pushing back on our rates (some have even suggested we should donate our time because we believe in what we do). If your organization believes that transformative leadership work is important, we encourage you to reflect that in your budget. A good frame of reference is to look at what you are willing to pay for technical skills such as computer programming, financial consulting, or engineering and hold up a mirror to how you value transformational leadership work and skilled facilitation of structural change processes.

  • Solidarity - We set these rates as an attempt to be in solidarity with individuals and organizations who are surviving. We recognize that in some cases this rate may still not be accessible, and we encourage anyone to get in touch if that is the case.

    Full - This rate represents the ‘true cost’ at which we would break even after paying our expenses. At this rate we can meet our financial commitments.

    Redistribution - Redistribution means ‘paying your fair share’ for individuals and organizations who have had structural advantage and access to wealth. We use redistribution rates to support our solidarity clients, offer donation-based programs for BIPOC, and contribute to Black & Indigenous-led organizing where we live.

  • The organizational sliding scale represents payment for:

    • Workshop Facilitation & Speaking Engagements

    • Design & Preparation

    • Coaching

    • Traveling (% of hourly rate)

    When we are pricing a workshop facilitation or coaching service, we take into account our time for design, administration, client communication, and travel. During our initial consults, we will work together to either offer an all-inclusive rate within our fee framework or build a contract for hourly billing. In general, we estimate 2 hours of design time per facilitation hour, per facilitator. We offer bundled rates for longer engagement and workshop series as opposed to stand-alone events, which cost more. With a few rare exceptions, we always do custom design for each client after learning about the current conditions in the group or organization.

  • Please note that all KarenM workshops are subject to time change or cancellation due to unforeseen circumstances. In the case of rescheduling, all participants will be offered the option to receive a full refund or register for the new workshop date. In the case of cancellation, all participants will receive a full refund.

  • For coaching and organizational workshops, we will send an invoice in advance of the coaching or workshop delivery date. We accept most forms of payment, including

    • ApplePay

    • VISA

    • Mastercard

    • Discover

    Note: 2.99% per credit card, PayPal, and Venmo transaction.

    • Bank transfer (1% per transaction)