During a Warm Up meeting we will have an opportunity to get to know each other a bit and check if we there is a potential for us to be a good team. You will be able to share questions and doubts you might have and we both will be able to evaluate, if I am the right person to help you with the changes you want to make in your life. We will also establish, if what you want to accomplish should be rather a part of a coaching or counseling framework.
A hint here – coaching is more action-oriented, whereas counseling is rather coping-oriented.
Coaching will help you set and achieve goals you already have in mind and you are motivated towards. Counseling can help you recognize and solve your problems in life, like coping better with a stressful situation, managing an important transition, or working on your current relationships. It can help you get a sense of direction, while you discuss your daily struggles.
Please note that in the online setting, I do not work with clients with diagnosed clinical psychiatric conditions, who require parallel psychiatric treatment or long-term psychotherapy.
If we decide to collaborate, after the meeting I will send you a detailed offer, adjusted to your goals and needs. It will include:
- a short summary of our meeting, just to make sure I got everything right
- the agreed number of sessions needed to accomplish our goal or a timeframe we agreed upon,
- contract describing the framework and ground rules for our collaboration
- link to schedule future online sessions or an address if we agredd on in-person meetings,
- pricing with the payment information.
If you will inform me that all is in order and the payment will be confirmed, we will start our work.
The first step will be me sending you a set of worksheets or a workbook that could help you do some initial work before our first official session. It will contain questions to answer or actions to take, sometimes a topic to think about to help you get better insights.
In general, I tend to encourage process-related activity in between meetings. I strongly believe that if both, you and I, are immersed in the change-related mindset outside of our one-to-ones, the progress will not only be more stable over time but will have a better chance of being permanent.
This is important to note – the moment we start working together I see us as a team heading towards a shared goal. It will depend on both of us if we will reach it, so your active participation and engagement are necessary. Regularly failing to show up for meetings, and not doing the agreed work in between them, will result in the termination of our collaboration.
The meeting schedule depends on the timeframe we agreed on, but from my experience having a conversation every two weeks usually gives enough space to observe if things are progressing satisfactorily. The closer we are to finalizing our work, the more probable and possible it is to meet once a month, often with a follow-up after 6 months for longer-term goals.