Beautiful You Archives

Coaching as a skill + how to skill up in the best way!

August 30, 2019

In this post, I share my learning about coaching as a skill and how to get skilled up in life coaching via the Beautiful You Coaching Academy!

Coaching as a skill

Coaching is a skill like teaching, writing, painting, counselling, copywriting or managing social media skilfully.

As I trained to become a life coach and developed my skills, I realised it is a skill-set I can hone and combine with other unique skills gained through life experience and formal and informal learning.

You might be seeing quite a lot of life coaches and coaches generally out there and thinking that it is a crowded market. Furthermore, you might think there’s no room for you.

It is true that the field is attracting growth and people wanting a new life direction. It’s attractive because it works as a skill to guide and support others in their personal development. Being a life coach is very satisfying and fulfilling work.

Coaching is also a flexible skill-set you can combine with others to create a new life. There is abundant space for you to bring your unique skills and experience together with coaching to see where it takes you. And to fulfil long-held dreams you may have.

Coaching is a skill you can endlessly combine with teaching, parenting, creativity, personality, self-leadership, design, wellbeing, spirituality, mindfulness, business and marketing, just to name a few skill-sets. If you think of coaching in this way, it helps you open up the possibilities for you and your situation. It’s potentially the gateway to a whole new way of life.

My skill-set I blend with coaching as a skill

I began my coaching journey with a background as a teacher and leader in the adult vocational education sector in Australia. Teaching and mentoring are key skills in my skill-set gained over time through formal study and practice in the workplace. I supported the skills training of thousands of students as well as going on to become a leader of teachers and support staff. As a leader, I worked on mentoring and coaching others and leading innovation in online learning.

My passion is writing and creativity. I have worked on writing as a skill nearly all my life including as a teacher of writing. I am a published poet and writer and I’ve blogged for nearly ten years. A learning and language expert, I have studied to Masters level and have two diplomas of education. Such is my love of learning!

Weaving skills together

Alongside becoming a coach, I also trained as a Jung/Myers-Briggs personality type practitioner and coach. Becoming a personality type coach fulfilled a long-held dream. I am now active in national and international type communities including speaking in Australia and the UK at the British Association of Psychological Type on type and transition.

In my coaching, I weave these passions and skills – creativity, personality and self-leadership – together with coaching skills. All my learning in these three areas is at the heart of my offerings and work. I blend them together into a unique blend focused on wholehearted self-leadership. Plus I’ve written a book, Wholehearted: Self-leadership for Women in Transition which is accompanied by a Wholehearted Companion Workbook for practical application.

And I keep working on my coaching skills and being coached – it’s that important as a skill in my life and can be in yours.

Many unique blends of skills

I share my story to show how life coaching as a skill can weave together with other skills. There are as many unique blends of skills as there are people in the world.

I am amazed as I connect with fellow coaches in the Beautiful You Coaching Academy community that no two of us are the same. We are all pursuing our passions, vocation and desired feelings and supporting our clients in different ways depending on our background. There might be similarities in some passions and skills, but the blend we each bring and how we put it together makes each of us and our offerings unique.

There are so many ways you can combine coaching as a skill with your existing, emerging and desired skill-sets.

What skills you could blend together with coaching to create your unique offerings in the world?

Adding coaching to your skill-set

In the Beautiful You course, you are taught about coaching as a skill and the practical ways of working as a life coach. The course explores:

1:1 coaching
group coaching
branding + your niche
events
podcasts
blogging
social media
running a coaching business
speaking

You learn about coaching skills of: goal-setting, questioning, listening, facilitating rich coaching conversations and skillfully managing a coaching series every step of the way.

Coaching as a skill combines with various delivery methods, income sources and ways of getting your unique message out into the world. Combining life coaching as a skill with other disciplines, skills and business approaches yields so many opportunities. Your personality and passions help you work out where to focus and how to blend your skills best in line with your gifts and strengths.

The training is just the start. There is ongoing support and encouragement via Beautiful You after your course as you further develop. You connect with a fabulously diverse and global community to continue to learn with and from. Making new and deep friendships is an ongoing legacy of the course.

In addition to being a skill, life coaching is a pathway to deeper purpose and meaning, for both you and the people you coach, and that is priceless.

As Beautiful You CEO Julie Parker says in an Inspired Coach issue:

It’s all about connecting with those whose message authentically aligns with your own.

And there are so many unique ways to do that!

Be in action!

So consider how life coaching might play a role in your life! How might you add it to your unique skill-set, body of work, knowledge and experience to shape a new life?

Add the heart-centred, flexible, creative and vitally important skill of coaching to your skill-set. See what magic you can create in the world.

As Steven Pressfield invokes us in The War of Art:

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.

Head over to the Beautiful You Coaching Course page for more information.

I look forward to the possibility of working with you! Any questions? Just send me a message using the below form! Or to book a free, no-obligation Discovery Call, go direct to this link.

Keep in touch

Quiet Writing is on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter – Please visit to keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. There are regular posts on coaching, books, tarot, intuition, influence, passion, creativity, productivity, writing, voice, introversion and personality type.

Subscribe via email below to make sure you receive updates from Quiet Writing on life coaching, writing, personality type and other connections to help you express your unique voice in the world your way.

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Become a Life Coach + live your change

September 21, 2018

You must be the change you wish to be in the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

I’m excited to share my journey to become a life coach with the Beautiful You Coaching Academy + opportunities if you also want to become a life coach!

As a certified life coach, affiliate and ambassador for the Beautiful You Coaching Academy, I am truly delighted to share my experiences with you.

My key message is to be the change you wish to be.

Truly live it! And a fabulous pathway to this is to embark on the personal development journey to become a life coach. In this way, you can support the growth of others, as you beautifully enhance your own.

My journey to become a coach

It’s hard to believe it’s more than two years since I started on the Beautiful You Coaching Academy Life Coaching course journey. I remember receiving my learning resources with the most gorgeous, handwritten welcome note from lead trainer and CEO, Julie Parker.

I identified becoming a life coach as a key part of my transition from 30-plus years as a teacher and leader in the adult vocational education sector. For a long time, I’d yearned for more freedom and time for creativity, especially to write the books I desired to write.

I had already started to make a plan to leave and start a new life. But a particular incident at work one day was like a kick in the guts, accelerating my transition journey. A message delivered in a meeting left me stunned, staring at the blue sky outside, unable to participate any further. It left me reeling. In essence, it was saying that after all I had invested in the organisation, I was no longer valued. I cried all the way home and hardly slept for days. Unable to work the following week, I spent days recovering. In that time, I began to plan my new future.

The first thing I did the morning after the incident was reach out to my friend, Victoria, who was a life coach. Feeling very raw, I asked her to help me chart a course to create a new life. Soon after, I started coaching with Victoria, then began part-time job-share arrangements at work to make space for transition. Before too long, it became clear that a new life plan was not a choice, it was a necessity. Redundancy was imminent – the organisation was also headed in different directions and I truly was not valued.

Fast forward to now

Since that time, I completed the Beautiful You Life Coaching course and honed my life coaching skills through a series of deep engagements with clients. Building on my skills as a teacher and leader, I’m now a practising Certified Life Coach focused on creativity and self-leadership, especially for women in transition. Women who are undergoing experiences like I have been through. I am an accredited Personality Type assessor and practitioner, as well as a writer and intuitive tarot reader. These are all skills I chose to learn or deepen as I went on this journey – my passions and loves.

Life coaching is linked to writing and teaching as key aspects of my life. Writing is my creative focus and raison d’être, but teaching and supporting people to reach their potential is also what I have engaged in deeply through-out my work life. I’ve been a coach and mentor in the workplace and worked with coaches in the workplace as a leader. So when the time came to leave my job, my transition plan had writing and coaching as two core elements complementing each other.

Becoming a life coach became a key pillar of this plan for a new life. It’s a skill and personal journey you can integrate with many other life skills and passions as you seek to shape a new life and be of service to others.

Working with life coaches + life transition

I can’t say enough about the value of being a life coach and working with life coaches to support you on key transition journeys. Working with coaches has been a key support along this two-year transition journey, helping me to make meaning. My coach, Victoria, helped me start my journey at that very tender time when I knew I had to make plans to leave. As well, on the coaching journey with Beautiful You, every trainee has the opportunity to buddy coach with a fellow trainee. Below is a picture of me (on the left) with my gorgeous and inspiring coaching buddy, Jeanette. We shared powerful and supportive learning and coaching experiences as we mutually embarked on this adventure.

My coaching needs focused on strength and self-care as I was also supporting my mother who was very unwell with cancer. Sadly, she passed away at the end of last year after a very difficult time. I focused on making sure my self-care and wellness strategies were in place when life was tough. When I was caring for another just as I was making a major life transition.

Now, I am much healthier and stronger, swimming in the ocean a few times a week and back to yoga after a break. I also worked with a certified Beautiful You coach on my writing to make sure it was a priority on this journey. I went on a writing and yoga retreat in beautiful Hoi An, Vietnam.

After two years on this journey, working with a number of coaches, studying with Beautiful You, becoming a Personality Type practitioner and establishing both my coaching and writing practice, life looks very different. I’d like to help you make life look different too – so read on!

Why become a life coach?

Life coaching is an incredible support as we move through times of change and make a path to achieve our goals. Especially those long term goals we have held very close. Life coaching and the support and community of coaches is simply part of how I make meaning in life now.

It is especially powerful at times of major transition and creativity like: experiencing redundancy, not wanting to stay where you are, starting a business around your passions, writing a book or seeking more creative life options.

I struggled as I wrote this piece to separate out the journey to become a life coach from the fabulous support and experience that life coaching has afforded me. They are in essence all part of the same journey. It becomes a skill you learn but also a mindset you live. My learning to become a coach coincided with other deep life experiences that involved holding space for others at critical times. My skills as a life coach helped me navigate those times with self-leadership and strength.

Some of the reasons to become a life coach are that it is:

something you can do from anywhere, a flexible skill that is infinitely portable.
work that you can dial up and down, in combination with other life priorities and work streams.
a skill that integrates with other life passions: Life coaches work in all kinds of niches reflecting their uniqueness.
a rich and ongoing journey of personal development.
a way to connect with other like-minded people interested in self-development and deep connection.
focused on being in service, using your skills, knowledge and experience to support others.
a rich skill-set for all of life: mindfulness, listening, asking questions, holding space, supporting, encouraging and cheering others on.

Why Beautiful You Coaching Academy?

As a graduate, affiliate and ambassador for the Beautiful You Coaching Academy, I wholeheartedly recommend the Academy’s Life Coaching Course. The many positives of the program and experience include:

solid theory and practice, well-structured and professionally managed with the ability to study online from across the world;
exceptional leadership and teaching via CEO and lead trainer Julie Parker and her team, all skilled, successful and experienced life coaches;
a rich, diverse, supportive and welcoming community of coaches within the Beautiful You network;
the ability to learn how to build and grow your own coaching business you can operate from anywhere in the world and with a global reach;
an academy that supports and promotes the work of its coaches, providing opportunities to shine and extend;
the opportunity to pursue a certified coach pathway; and
making many new deep friendships and connections across the world via a common interest in personal growth.

Become a life coach with my support

So, I am so excited to be offering a number of coaching opportunities for you to become a coach as an affiliate of the Beautiful You Coaching Academy.

Firstly, if you know you would like to sign up for the first Beautiful You Coaching Course in 2020, don’t delay. It’s 80% full already and places fill quickly.

As an affiliate, I endorse the course and receive an affiliate payment for providing this recommendation. You have no additional costs in enrolling and there is an exciting benefit for you as well!

You can read further below about the opportunity to work with me also for a 6-session coaching series at no cost to you as well.

You can find out more about the course at the Beautiful You Coaching Academy website here.

Importantly, if you wish to access the 6-session coaching session with me at no cost to you, make sure when you complete the order form to enrol in the course, that you enter MY NAME – TERRI CONNELLAN – (first and last) in the CODE field of the order page. This will link you to me and my offer. So easy!

Important Note: If you enter my name in any other area than the one instructed, (which is the code field at your enrolment stage – please see graphic below), or not at all at the exact time of your enrolment, you will not be able to receive my affiliate offerings. This is not something that can be amended at a later time and so please be careful at your sign up stage to do this as I want to be able to support you on your coaching journey!

Thanks to @annamarialocke for this image!

Create Your Deeper Story life coaching series

So more on my offer!

In choosing to become a life coach with Beautiful You, I would love to offer you the opportunity to work with me as your coach! This is via a ‘Create Your Deeper Story’ Coaching series of 6 sessions over a 3 month period on areas important to you and your life path. Just remember to email Beautiful You with my name BEFORE you enrol.

The value of this investment in your future for this life-changing series is $330AU per month, a total of $990AU over 3 months. But it will provided at no cost to you. You only need to make sure you enter my name at the CODE field in the Course Order/enrolment form (as above) and remain in study to the end of the refund period.

The ‘Create Your Deeper Story’ Coaching series helps you identify where you want to be and how to get there in very practical goal and action-oriented steps. One step at a time with wholehearted, grounded support and practicality. I focus on creativity and self-leadership coaching but you let me know exactly where you want to focus! It’s your story. Skilled in personality type assessment, I weave personality type knowledge deep into my coaching and offer special deep-dives into this area as a separate opportunity.

As a Certified Life Coach with Beautiful You, I can help you with your own pathway towards certification as a life coach with the Academy. A six-session coaching series with me can count towards your own certification pathway as well.

Where to contact me:

So I hope you are excited by what all of this means for you!

To become a Life Coach, you can enrol straight away via the Beautiful You Coaching Academy Course Page (make sure you include my name on the form as above!) or you can contact me if you have any questions:

via email: terri@quietwriting.com
or via direct message on social media – via Facebook or Instagram if we are already connected

I would love to support you to become a life coach and to work with you!

Please feel free to share with anyone who you think might benefit from this opportunity.

Keep in touch

Quiet Writing is on Facebook – Please visit here and ‘Like’ to keep in touch and interact with the growing Quiet Writing community. There are regular posts on coaching, books, tarot, intuition, influence, passion, creativity, productivity, writing, voice, introversion and personality type.

Subscribe via email (see the link at the top and below) to make sure you receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions. This includes life coaching, writing, personality type and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

Pro Bono Life Coaching – an opportunity to shine!

May 18, 2017

At the centre of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.

Lao Tzu

UPDATE at February 2018: Pro Bono Life Coaching opportunities are now fully subscribed – thanks to those who have expressed interest. But do still read ahead about the launch of Quiet Writing Coaching and my background! You can go to Work with me to find out about current opportunities!

I’m so excited today to be officially launching Quiet Writing Coaching with a limited number of pro bono life coaching opportunities for women!

It’s hard to believe that it’s nearly four months since I started the Beautiful You Coaching Academy Life Coaching course and received my learning resources with the most gorgeous, handwritten welcome note from our lead trainer and CEO of Beautiful You, Julie Parker.

Since that time, I’ve been studying and practicing coaching and I’m now ready to commence offering pro bono life coaching. This marks the official commencement of my coaching practice in the world – something I have been planning now for over a year. And I’m very excited!

In this post I will share my journey to this point, explain what life coaching is and what this pro bono coaching opportunity offers. I also want to share what I bring to coaching and who I see myself best supporting.

My journey to coaching

My decision to gain skills and experience in coaching is linked to writing. Writing and coaching are twin skills that I want to weave together to form a new path in my life. Writing is my creative focus and raison d’être, an area of my life where I would like to do so much more. But teaching and supporting people to reach their potential, especially creatively, has also been an area I have engaged in deeply through-out my working life.

I’ve worked with coaches in the workplace especially in partnership as a leader to help support the growth of my teams. I’ve been a mentor and I’ve been mentored in my work roles. When I decided I need to start making a transition to a new way of living and working last year, I reached out to a coach to support me at a critical time. And this has made all the difference in shaping this time. Thanks to my desire to change and thanks to my wonderful coach.

And as part of my coaching journey through Beautiful You, I’ve been working with a buddy coach where we have shared powerful learning and coaching experiences mutually as we embark on this adventure. It’s challenging times as a I work on this journey; my beautiful mum is very unwell and I am supporting her which is an emotional journey. I don’t write so much about this here as it’s private. But I’ve worked on my self-care and wellbeing as I move through this time so I can be strong and well especially for my mum but also for myself and others in my life. I am now so much healthier and stronger after this short time – swimming in the ocean a few times a week and back to yoga classes twice a week. Thanks to my commitment to change and thanks to my wonderful coach. Here is a picture of me on the left with my gorgeous and inspiring coach buddy, Jeanette.

Photo credit to Emma Louise Newby @emmalouisenewby

What is life coaching?

So as you can see life coaching can be an incredible support as we move through times of change and make a path to those goals that are in our heart. Especially those long term goals we have held very close.

Life coaching provides a structured and goal oriented framework to help you achieve what you want in life. It draws from a variety of disciplines including psychology, sociology, personal development and social development. Life coaching helps you move from where you are to where you want to be through supported and guided goal-setting and action. Importantly, it’s not the same as therapy or counselling; it’s more future focused and action focused.

People who choose to work with life coaches come from a range of backgrounds and work on goals as diverse as:

making a positive career transition to a more fulfilling job or way of working
driving creative projects such as writing a book or starting a blog
becoming healthier, fitter and stronger
having positive and meaningful relationships
improving self-confidence and self-belief
creating energising and nourishing self-care routines
living an inspired and balanced life.

Life coaching can take place in person or via technology such as over the phone or via Skype or Zoom. It can take place with individuals, in groups or in workplaces.

What I bring to coaching and where I want to focus

I’m choosing to focus on career and creativity coaching and I bring to that: extensive experience in adult and vocational education; certification in MBTI/personality type assessment; and a passion for creativity, writing and books that drives everything I do.

You can learn more about me here.

With my experience in leadership and creativity, I am interested in how coaching can be a form of self-leadership. Just as we can lead others and take the lead in situations, the most important form of orchestrating leadership is how we take ourselves forward and bring the pieces of our lives together.

My introvert qualities help me work from writing as a strength and I believe everyone can shine in their own way. We just need to find the threads that pull our unique story together. That’s what I am keen to do with my coaching and writing work at Quiet Writing – to support people to find the threads of their story and shine.

And I’ve done the work. I’m finding the threads of my story and weaving them together too:

I’ve sat in cafes and on trains before work, writing and studying poetry, to tap into that source and learn more.
I’ve walked into work and felt like I’m leaving large parts of myself behind, the most important parts, and felt so sad about it. So I’m taking that feeling forward to plan a different future.
I’ve woven creativity into my day job as much as I could, especially as a leader of innovative practice. I’ve learnt from this but there’s still so much more I want to be doing.
I’ve listened to so many podcasts and read so many books! That will always be the way as I love learning. But it’s time for me to take these influences forward into my unique brand of coaching and writing work and live the life I want.

I’ve studied and worked and read and I’m keen to bring all these pieces together and find the gold threads and from there to make a new creatively based lifestyle.

It’s time for me to be more whole-hearted and coaching and writing are the keys to that. So I’m working through it all and I’m on the journey. And I’m keen to support you also on your journey to work on goals that bring more heart to what you do and what you want to do.

So how about you?

So if any of these thoughts and experiences about creativity and career, about self-leadership and feeling more whole-hearted, about doing the work, are resonating with you, I’d love to work with you.

I feel especially called to work with women who:

want to be more whole-hearted about the work they do; by this I mean, feeling more whole – like all of your important and valued parts are in play and activated, not left at the door or buried somewhere;
are trying to find their unique voice and space in their career and creative world;
have skills and experience they wish to take as a foundation and recast into a new vision and path;
want to take the steps to create the life they want and to shine.

I’d love to have a chat with you if you’d like to feel more satisfied with your life and make more informed choices about how to be creative and make a living. Or if you’re keen on getting your creative projects moving and are trying to work out how to combine creativity and career more effectively. These are areas I care so much about and can support you in.

My pro bono life coaching offering

So, I am so excited to be offering my first pro bono life coaching opportunities right now to a small number of women as I step into my future as a coach and a writer.

As a coach in training, my plan is to start with a number of limited pro bono opportunities now and focus on them for the next few months.

What I am offering now is:

the opportunity to work with me as your coach for a coaching series of 6 sessions over a 3 month period on areas that are important to you and your life path;
a 30 minute consultation upfront to start the process to ensure we are a positive fit and to identify areas of possible focus to ensure maximum value from our sessions. You will be asked to fill out a short questionnaire prior to this first discussion.

In return, and in lieu of any monetary exchange for this pro bono coaching series offering, you need to provide:

a (glowing) testimonial with a photo within one week of your coaching series finishing and
a shout out where you can about the great experience you have had with me as your coach.

Once we have the 30 minute consultation, we will identify the dates and schedule for our sessions so we can make them a priority once an hour each fortnight.

In practical terms, I’m in Australia but you can be anywhere in the world. We would work via technology based services like Skype for our sessions.

As you can see, it’s all about my learning, the benefit to you of a fabulous and productive coaching series with me and the opportunity for me to launch my coaching work as positively as I can, building on my current experience and yours. A super win-win!

Where to contact me:

So I hope you are excited by what this might mean for you!

If you are interested in being considered for this coaching opportunity, noting that they are small in number and only available for a limited time, please contact me:

via email: terri@quietwriting.com
or via direct message on social media – via Facebook or Instagram if we are already connected

I would love to work with you now or into the future in Quiet Writing Coaching!

Please feel free to share with anyone who you think might benefit from this opportunity.

Thought pieces

I usually finish my blog posts with thought pieces – related thoughts, symbols, references – being an intuitive with an associative mind, connections pop up and I like to include them here.

For today, it’s a tarot card – the beautiful Three of Earth – also known as the Three of Pentacles (Coins) from the recently released ‘The Good Tarot’ by Colette Baron-Reid.

I start my day with a tarot and oracle reading for guidance and sometimes I hesitate to do that first and feel I should get on with my work. Then I get the most helpful insights and the reminder from the cards that this is my work. The intuitive wisdom feeds deeply into my day and visions and what I can then share with others to inspire them.

Today’s question was about coaching, this pro bono coaching offer and how it fits with my vision and with yours.

So here is the beautiful Three of Earth:

How gorgeous are her butterfly glasses – transformative and seeing far into the future, grounded in the here and now, but lifting her gaze. Here are Colette Baron-Reid’s words on this card:

Teamwork, building on solid foundations, group efforts, dedicated collaboration

What I am building is grounded in a solid foundation, so I know I can trust it will not slip away suddenly. I am joined by others in coordinated efforts to bring forth what we have chosen to co-create. The architecture of my dreams is becoming tangible, taking shape before me, and I share my joy and pride with my partners and supporters. Teachers and students, we are all learning, growing, and building collaboratively.

It really is all about co-creation. My future and yours. Thank you for your support – it’s such a pleasure to learn, grow and build collaboratively with you. Let’s put on our butterfly glasses together and see our vision and shine!

Keep in touch

Subscribe via email (see the link at the top and below) to make sure you receive updates from Quiet Writing and its passions in 2017. This includes tarot, MBTI developments, life coaching and other connections to help express your unique voice in the world.

If you enjoyed this post, please share via your preferred social media channel – links are below.

Beautiful You

Coaching as a skill + how to skill up in the best way!

Coaching as a skill

My skill-set I blend with coaching as a skill

Weaving skills together

Many unique blends of skills

Adding coaching to your skill-set

Be in action!

Keep in touch

Like this:

Become a Life Coach + live your change