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What is eCoaching and How Does It Work?

Career Discovery
06/12/23 - Ama La Vida
Woman in coffee shop on laptop building her side hustle.

Working with a coach can massively transform your personal and professional life, and offers a personalized approach to professional development that can help individuals achieve their full potential. Through communication and feedback, coaches can guide clients to gain a deeper understanding of themselves, their values, and their goals. This process can lead to increased confidence, productivity, and performance, benefiting not only the individual but also their teams and organizations. The coaching relationship is a collaborative effort where coaches provide guidance, support, and tools to help clients set and achieve their goals. By working with a coach, individuals have access to a professional who can help them develop their skills and provide valuable insights that can positively impact their personal and professional life.

While working with a coach can offer many benefits, there are also some potential drawbacks in a coaching relationship. For example, coaching can be expensive, which may make it inaccessible to some individuals or organizations. Beyond all this, coaching can be very dependent on the coach themself. Every coach and coaching program brings its own process and approach, which can make it difficult to measure consistent results. Another hurdle is the difficulty in maintaining progress between sessions, since this part requires personal commitment and consistent effort. Without proper dedication, it can be challenging to maximize the impact of coaching sessions.

Despite these potential drawbacks, many individuals and organizations have found coaching to be a valuable tool for personal and professional development. Enter: eCoaching.

Why we built an eCoaching platform

woman doing eCoaching content on laptop sitting on her living room floor

In our mid 20’s, before we founded Ama La Vida, we were worn out management consultants who knew we were in careers that we wanted out of. We had done all the “right” things: got phenomenal grades in college, landed highly sought-after jobs and quickly moved through the ranks of our respective organizations. On paper, things looked great. But in our hearts and minds, we knew we needed and wanted more, for ourselves, our careers and how we spend the vast majority of our waking hours.

We were both coincidentally introduced to coaching, where it promptly changed our lives.

As we transitioned out of our consulting roles and into our new passion-filled startup adventure, we noticed many of our peers feeling exactly the same as we had felt – stuck, without hope, and unsure of how to get out and giving in to the notion that work isn’t something you are meant to enjoy.

We knew we needed to democratize coaching and make it more appealing and accessible for all who need it. Through coaching, we could activate people to move toward healthier and more fulfilling workplaces.

When we started our coaching journey, we quickly realized that there were many people who were stuck and unsure of how to get out of their current situations. We knew that coaching could help, but it was often too expensive and inaccessible for many individuals and organizations. That’s why we built our eCoaching platform. We wanted to create a solution that was more affordable, flexible, and scalable, without sacrificing the benefits of traditional coaching.

Our eCoaching platform is powered by trained and certified coaches who have developed evidence-based methodologies that are rooted in adult learning, positive psychology, and neuroscience. This means that our clients have access to a framework that is repeatable and provides consistent results. Our platform uses reflective questions and thought-provoking ideas to help clients gain insight for themselves, rather than just providing a series of training videos.

With our eCoaching platform, clients have access to professional coaching tools which can provide guidance, support, and insights to help them set and achieve their goals. They can embark on a self-reflective journey and reach their own insights, feeling completely in control of their ideas and solutions. Our platform is an online platform that mimics the experience of working with a live, human coach. It’s composed of predominantly coaching-based questions and is also enhanced with coaching videos, insights, activities, tips, resources, and challenges.

Our eCoaching platform is the perfect solution for those looking to benefit from the power of coaching sessions without breaking the bank.

What is eCoaching?

woman working while holding a tablet

Let us be clear: our eCoaching is not distance coaching. Distance coaching implies that you’re meeting 1:1 with a live, human coach virtually or remotely. While our coaching memberships do include 1:1 virtual coaching sessions, that’s not what we’re talking about here!

Intead, eCoaching is an online platform that mimics the experience of working with a live, human coach. This innovative technology-based solution was developed by Ama La Vida’s trained and certified coaches. We used the principles, models and methodologies developed by the International Coaching Federation and those applied in our everyday, live sessions with our clients.

How does eCoaching work?

career coach Natalia on a video coaching session

Our eCoaching tools are composed of predominantly coaching-based questions. This is what’s called a “coaching approach” and it’s designed to help you explore and unravel your thoughts, feelings, desires, actions, goals, and what’s been impeding your progress. This question-based coaching approach empowers the user to embark on a self-reflective journey. You reach their own insights and feel completely in control of their ideas and solutions.

The program is also enhanced with coaching videos, insights, activities, tips, resources, and challenges. These extra tools give you a fresh perspective and new ways of thinking to ensure you continue making progress.

The platform and its programs were developed using evidence-based coaching models and methodologies. They are rooted in adult learning, positive psychology, and neuroscience. Let’s dive into these a little deeper.

Positive Psychology

The eCoaching process focuses not on what was or what is, but instead on what could be.  In every eCoaching module, individuals are prompted to understand obstacles, develop solutions and commit to new ways that they can apply these solutions to increase their fulfillment and performance.  The focus is on extracting potential for the future, not only identifying potential, but also devising application-based strategies to reach it.

eCoaching also helps individuals to transform negative thinking habits and reappraise ‘problems’ to identify solutions. The individual is encouraged to consider the valuable lessons and insights that arise from each and every experience. This helps them to transform stifling perceptions of ‘failure’ and develop a ‘growth-mindset.’

The Neuroscience behind it

Telling people what they should do or giving them a simple solution to a complicated problem is very rarely effective. People need to make their own connections, come to their own insights and develop their own solutions in order to make meaningful decisions that result in sustainable change.

Unfortunately, this requires a lot of effort and energy. And this often leads to being overwhelmed. Without a coach, individuals very rarely engage in this type of deep and self-directed thinking on their own.

Daniel Kahneman, a noted psychologist known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, has studied this phenomenon in depth and explores the concepts in his book Thinking Fast and Slow. He explains two types of thinking. “System one” is the fast, automatic and default approach. “System two” is the mind’s slower, deeper and analytical mode. Typically, the process of fundamental and sustained growth can only occur when we engage in system two thinking. However, because this “slow thinking” is more arduous and draining, we often quickly revert back to “system one” thinking. This habit leads us to make decisions that aren’t carefully considered and thought out.

The eCoaching platform helps individuals overcome this obstacle. It supports them to remain with their thoughts and reflection – in “system two” mode – for prolonged periods of time.

The questions, tools and empowering techniques used act as handrails for the individual to arrive at their own insights and solutions using system two thinking. If the individual feels stuck, they can reach out to their coach, who will be in touch, typically immediately.  The client is also encouraged and reassured with regular coaching videos, tips and resources. Because our clients arrive at their own conclusions, they have a far higher level of commitment, confidence and motivation to take meaningful action and achieve their desired results!

Why we love eCoaching

hands with yellow sweater and silver bracelets tying on a laptop

It helps you maintain progress between sessions with your coach

eCoaching revolutionizes the way we stay on track and make progress between coaching sessions. By leveraging technology and online platforms, ecoaching gives you space to set goals, practice, reflect, explore and move forward with a seamless flow of support and resources between your coaching sessions. You can continue learning, monitoring progress, and stay accountable.

In a nutshell, ecoaching bridges the gap between sessions, allowing you to maintain progress and achieve success with the support and guidance of your coach.

It saves our clients money

Let’s take navigating a career transition as an example. It starts with self-reflection. This helps you really understand who you are and what you need from your career to be happy. It then moves into aligning what you’ve learned about yourself with the job market to find the optimal career for you. After that, there are tactical activities to help you land the job like updating your resume and preparing for interviews. If we didn’t have some of the coaching work done in the platform, we would double the amount of sessions. This would nearly double the cost of the program to accomplish the same objective!

It’s reliable and repeatable

One of the problems with traditional one-on-one coaching services is that it can be hard to replicate. Because it’s based in technology, eCoaching holds the key to unlocking repeatable results. By leveraging cutting-edge communication technology and fostering a strong sense of accountability, this approach ensures a consistent and effective framework for your growth and success. It provides a structured path to help you define your goals, acquire valuable knowledge, and refine your essential skills.

Not only does eCoaching benefit individuals, but it also extends its advantages to teams, universities and organizations. Coaches can efficiently support and guide groups, fostering a positive and collaborative environment. This creates a shared sense of mission and values, contributing to improved performance and enhanced leadership skills.

Further, by leveraging a consistent coaching program, individual team members or students can be paired with different coaches so they are coached by someone who will be a good match for them personally, but know that they will receive consistent quality and content as they complete their program. By leveraging information and communication technology, Ama La Vida can also provide reporting and insights to program directors and leadership teams.

How is Ama La Vida eCoaching different from the others

person taking notes while looking at computer

Many coaching companies are “online” or may even use the term eCocahing. However, what most companies mean is that their coaching is virtual. It’s pretty typical in the coaching industry today for sessions to be conducted via video or phone versus in-person. We do our coaching remotely as well using Zoom.

When we say eCoaching, we don’t just mean live sessions conducted over the internet. We mean the use of our proprietary online eCoaching platform to make the conversations in our live sessions much richer and to make our coaching engagements more affordable, on-demand and data-backed.

Wrapping Up

Coaching is an immensely valuable way to develop both personally and professionally. It helps you set goals that are meaningful, improve self-awareness, emotional intelligence, confidence, productivity, and performance.  Clearly, there is no doubting the benefits! However, for a long time, coaching was financially out of reach for many individuals and organizations. Not only has coaching always been a significant financial investment, it has also brought about a range of logistical challenges costing valuable time and resources.

Our eCoaching technology has finally introduced an unprecedented solution – one that is affordable, measurable, flexible and scalable meaning that both individuals and organizations can benefit from the same powerful results of traditional coaching but with the convenience and comfort of their own space and time.

Want to learn more? Schedule a complimentary consult with a member of our team.

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