The coaching program is 6 months long. In the first part of the program, fellows go through 8 sessions of 1-on-1 personalized coaching in four months. In the second part of the program, fellows have access to three sessions of 1-on-1 personalized coaching in two months.
A coach is NOT the same as a mentor, consultant, or career counselor.
A mentor/consultant will set out to train or give you direct advice in support of the professional goal or project you are attempting to accomplish. A career counselor will help you to hone professional development skills such as creating a resume or cover letter, and give you direction on your career path.
A Coaching Fellowship coach, on the other hand, will work with you to reach your personal and professional goals. They will guide you and help you to focus on your strengths, rather directly advising you. They will enable you to grow, motivate you and hold you accountable to your goals.
Here’s a helpful chart to further clarify what a coach is:
Your coach will:
Your coach will NOT:
We match a fellow with a coach as much as possible based on timezone compatibility, and also consider a coach’s experience and fellow’s needs. Note: a coach may be in a completely different country than the fellow - so far our coaches are based in 23 countries and we continue to expand with each program.
All our coaches are professionally trained, highly experienced in leadership development, and very dedicated to supporting our fellows. They come from very different backgrounds than our fellows, and are experts in helping our fellows help themselves. Our coaches are completely committed to our fellows’ success and growth. They are here to help our fellows gain better understanding of their strengths and blind spots, both personally and professionally.
All coaching sessions are held on the phone / Skype / WhatsApp / Google-hangouts, whichever fellows and coaches prefers. Fellows and coaches generally discuss this in the first meeting and design together what works the best.
It is customary for fellows to initiate the call/skype connection for each coaching session.
A fellow and her coach decide together how frequently to coach, and also how long each coaching session will be. We recommend meeting regularly and have sessions either each week or every two weeks, because the most change and transformation happens with consistency.
First, fellows set the pace and bring a topic or focus area she’d like to look at for that specific session. It could be tightly connected to one of her goals or focus areas identified at the beginning of the Fellowship, but it might be something different that feels immediately important to explore.
The coach will expect the fellow to bring discussion topics to each coaching session. What this means is, keeping the overall coaching goal in mind, each fellow should come to each coaching session prepared with micro-topics she’d like to discuss or share with her coach. It could be something that happened during the week; a thought that has been bothering her; an idea that just came to her; an observation of herself. Bottomline, a fellow needs to bring the topics to get the conversation started.
During the coaching session, the coach will be there to guide the exploration alongside the fellow by asking powerful questions, conducting exercises, and helping her to clarify what she wants and how she feels. Fellows can count on her coach to help unfold new perspectives to challenges, highlight her strengths, and champion her and her growth.
Every coach has their own unique approach, but expect coach to check in with the fellow on the approaches and tools that work best for her. Through it all the coach will help the fellow to work on the specific topic for that session, and at the same time help her work towards her larger goals for coaching.
In the first coaching session, a coach discusses with his/her fellow her goals for coaching, and areas like strengths, values and challenges. We call the first session a ‘Discovery’ or ‘Launch’ Session. The coach will also guide a conversation about how you will work together - timing, frequency, ways of being, and more. We want to ensure that each fellow has a clear idea of what she’d like to accomplish with her coach before getting started.
Coaching goals may be very specific or broad, but ideally contain what the focus area is and also outline what it would look like if a fellow were to make the change or accomplish her goal.
With coaching there is usually homework or next steps to focus on. At the end of each session, a coach will ask the fellow what she wants to do as next steps or offer an inquiry/further questions to consider. The Coach is likely to give a fellow something to work on or to reflect on. Coaching is always focused on ‘Forwarding the Action and Deepening the Learning!’ The coach will also discuss what kind of accountability support the fellow wants and if she would like to design a system for checking in with her coach between calls.
Yes. Each coaching session is private, personal, and confidential. We have a contract agreement with all our coaches whereby they must keep the confidentiality of their fellows unless required to do so by law (e.g., illegal activity, pursuant to valid court order or subpoena; imminent or likely risk of danger to self or to others; etc) Visit the International Coach Federation Code of Ethics Section 4: Confidentiality/Privacy for further explanation.
Fellows do not share the contents of their coaching sessions unless the fellow wants to specifically outside of the coaching relationship. Fellows are required to complete pre and post-program surveys for us to understand how effective the program is and how we can best support the fellows. However, we do not expect fellows to divulge any details if they do not wish to disclose.
No. Coaching is extremely personal and individualized. Each fellow and coach work on very different topics from session to session depending on the fellow’s needs and goals. During the program, we send out a weekly E-mail guiding fellows along the program.
Besides the on-boarding calls, fellows can meet the other fellows in the program, share experience, questions and concerns with our program manager during the Monthly Open Fellows Calls during the program period.
There are also other online platforms and offline events to connect with our 600+ alumnae from all over the world.
Once a fellow completes her coaching program, she automatically becomes part of our alumnae network. She will continue to be on our mailing list, receive invitations to our future events, have access to opportunities such as online workshops and trainings, and stay connected with the other alumnae members.
No, we have no age limit. However, 95% of our applicants and fellows are aged between 25 and 35. Our mission is to support younger women leaders on their journey. We do not discriminate against age. Our evaluation criteria is based on the scope and scale of impact, and where the individual is in her career to maximize her growth.
We have a requirement that a fellow in the TCFS program is emotionally and mentally stable before joining our program. If you have experienced significant emotional trauma, a traumatic event, and have been in recovery or treatment in the last 12 month, we recommend that you consider applying for our fellowship program after at least 12 months post-recovery.
Coaching is a wonderful process for opening up transformation and going deep, but the serious concern is that it can also trigger traumatic emotions if you are recovering and healing from trauma, and because our coaches don’t have therapeutic training to support that, it could potentially harm you, and we would never, ever want that for anyone.
If you have any questions regarding this requirement, please reach out to us at hello@tcfs.org.
You can hear personal stories from our fellows who have completed the program on our blog. Or reach out to us with your questions at hello@tcfs.org.