Coaching The IDEA Mindset

A toolkit to coach with The IDEA Mindset and to build a successful and scalable career coaching practice.

How often do you come across potential coachees who tell you, “something needs to change, but I don’t know what?”  It’s one of the most common reasons why private clients come to coaching.

If you would like to find out how to become an IDEA Mindset Coach then contact me.

As coaches, we try to help them with pure International Coaching Federation-style coaching – what would you like to think about, why is that important, what would you like to achieve in our session and how will you know you’re there?  But often the coachee doesn’t come with the tools or knowledge required to come up with clear and impactful plans for the future.  That’s the “I don’t know what”!  As coaches, we can be easily tempted into the mentoring role, providing directional steer or overt advice to help the coachee through their career dilemma.  That’s frustrating because we’re in coaching to be coaches, not mentors.

Faced with a lack of clarity about how to progress, the coaching relationship can be over before it’s started.  Coaching is an expensive thing to invest in if you don’t feel you’re getting anywhere.

And so we face into three challenges:

1. How do we help the coachee to unlock new thinking and recognise early value from their investment in coaching?
2. How do we stay in the coaching role and avoid being drawn into giving advice and direction?
3. How do we build a sustainable and scalable coaching business based on high ticket, multi-session coaching interventions?

I designed The IDEA Mindset with these three challenges in mind.  Over the last few years I have refined the approach significantly, based on my experience of taking my early coaching clients through The IDEA Programme®, an eight-step coaching programme.  Now The IDEA Mindset is simplified and refined down to six steps and designed to be worked through with or without the support of a professional coach.

For the coachee, The IDEA Mindset is a powerful self-coaching model, taking them through a series of structured self-reflective exercises and habit-forming activities to help them discover a powerful new mindset and the clarity of figuring out what they want from work and how to get it.

For the coach, The IDEA Mindset is a simple and accessible model that ensures the coachee comes to the coaching session having completed rich and thought-provoking work so they have questions to face into and challenges to overcome, with your support.  The six steps naturally align to six 90 minute coaching sessions, with the coachee completing each week of The IDEA Mindset book before the time they have with you.

What do you charge for six 90 minute sessions of coaching?  How many clients do you have who would benefit from deeper self-reflection on figuring out what they want from work and how to get it?  Working with The IDEA Mindset framework gives you an easy access plug-and-play career coaching programme.

The IDEA Mindset approach can be used with coachees at any stage in their career.  I work on IDEA with clients ranging from people from their 20s to their 70s, although the programme is perhaps best suited to clients aged between 25 and 45 who are established in their careers and sufficiently financially stable to be able to explore choices that may incur either a temporary or longer-term impact on income.

This is what some of my clients say about The IDEA Mindset:

“The IDEA programme, devised and described by Gary Crotaz, provides an unusually useful combination of insight and action.  The diagnostic tools and the worksheets combine to both free and focus one’s thinking about where to go and how to get there.”

Vicki Sato, retired Professor of Management Practice, Harvard Business School

“The IDEA philosophy has been really effective in helping me understand and build on my strengths to become a more effective leader, whilst providing clarity and direction to help me progress ahead with an exciting career.  Working with Gary and his IDEA structure, made me realise what I was missing and changed the game for me.  Easily the best professional investment I have ever made.”

Craig Strong, Global Product & Innovation Practice Lead, Amazon Web Services (AWS)

“I’ve been working with Gary for a long time and his unique IDEA philosophy has helped me to change my outlook on my priorities and the way I approach work.  With the clarity that came from working through his IDEA Programme, I had the confidence to change to a new company and am now in my first Head of role in a fast-growing recruitment organisation.”

Gail Roumbies, Head of Operations, Retinue Talent Solutions

“The IDEA philosophy helped me reconnect with my inner voice, enlighten my career path and relationships using my unique talents. Gary is an extraordinary coach who truly gets to know your authentic self and is capable of supporting your most ambitious career goals!”

Marietta Melrose, Actress, ‘Atypical’ (Netflix comedy-drama television series)

Research by the think tank Global Future found that more than three-quarters of people in the UK say that the pandemic has made them re-evaluate the most important aspects of their lives and a poll by Aviva found almost half becoming less focused on the traditional ‘always on’ career (Guardian, July 2021).   Research by Microsoft shows that over 40% of people are considering leaving their current employer this year, that’s about double what you’d see in normal times (Microsoft, 2021).  And even if they’re staying they want work to change – 73% of employees want new flexible work options to stay (Microsoft, 2021).

And yet faced with this unprecedented demand for change, Global Future found that 80% of people had done little or nothing to achieve change (Guardian, July 2021).

That’s where The IDEA Mindset comes in.  Knowing who you are, what you stand for and what you’re uniquely great at, your Identity, and where you’re going – today, tomorrow, and in the future – your Direction, gives you the clarity you need to move forward.  That you’re building a future that you’ll love, your Engagement, and you’ll find deeply fulfilling and meaningful, your Authenticity, ensures that you’ll follow through and make it stick.