Coaching Without Borders

May 11, 2016 by John Andrew Williams

Do you know what it is not to have any borders? Air, friendship, love, understanding… Coaching!

It’s interesting to see how something lives and grows without any borders or limits but how some differences still remain in other countries. These differences are amazing and allow you to play around with different cultures and traditions so that you can make your own style richer with those special things.

I used to coach from a Slavic point of view on this. I’ve done it now for 4 years, and I have also worked as a psychologist for 10 years in Ukraine. It was interesting, wonderful, curious and a little bit challenging to discover the new world of Essential Life Coaching with Hayden Lee. The greatest challenge came from the cultural differences between our two coaching worlds.

In Ukraine, you mostly find yourself being a friend, older sister/brother, mentor and psychotherapist for your client, and a coach is more a partner and good listener, who asks powerful questions. Maybe it’s not about coaching systems at all, but about the client’s expectation.

Life coaching is still something new for Ukrainians. Coaching clients used to be clients of therapists and psychologists, and they did not just work with a coach. I have also noticed that clients in Ukraine are more oriented on the emotional BEING part of coaching and less on LEARNING and DOING. It makes the coaching process deep and very emotional. Because of this, a powerful coach-client relationship is really important for coaches in Ukraine. This does not mean that it is less important in the US or Europe, but here, it is a huge part of coaching and coaches should pay much attention to it.

Other topics that are popular in the Slavic world include: strong inner critic and self judgment, as well as emotional misbalance and shyness. I have noticed that my clients from Europe and the United States are more confident and active, so coaches there have more opportunities to build well – designed actions and get more responsibility from their clients. Meanwhile, here in East Europe, coaches need be a little more patient and work a lot with building abilities to make any action steps. You really have to build a vision with your clients, where they can see that they have all resources they need. Sometimes, coaching work here is very slow.

However, in the end, our clients will get the results they want and make core life changes no matter which side of Atlantic you live. There may be a variety of differences between coaching in Ukraine, but the ultimate goal and results are the same. Coaching doesn’t have any borders.