Understanding the patterns. Finding your direction. Creating meaningful change.
Sometimes the thing we want to change is obvious. We want to feel fitter, healthier or more energetic. We want to manage stress better, regain confidence, make a difficult decision, change direction or simply feel more in control of where life is taking us.
What is often less obvious is why we have arrived where we are.
My approach to personal coaching starts there.
Rather than treating individual difficulties as isolated problems to be fixed, I help people stand back and look at the wider system: the patterns in how they think, behave, respond and live, and the relationships between them.
A problem with motivation may not simply be a problem with motivation. Poor eating, declining fitness, disrupted sleep, stress, confidence, work pressures and the assumptions we hold about ourselves can interact in ways that are difficult to see when we're living inside them.
Understanding those connections can change what we choose to do next.
Coaching the whole person
I don't believe that people's lives divide particularly neatly into boxes labelled health, work, relationships and personal development.
The same person turns up in all of them.
That means our work might begin with one particular concern and lead us to explore something apparently quite different. The purpose isn't to diagnose what's “wrong” with you or tell you the direction in which you should go.
It's to help you understand yourself and your circumstances more clearly, identify the patterns that are helping or hindering you, and make more conscious choices about what happens next.
Ultimately, good coaching should make you less dependent upon your coach, not more. My aim is to help you become increasingly able to notice, understand and work with these patterns for yourself.
What might we work on?
Personal coaching can encompass a wide range of challenges and ambitions. These commonly include:
Health & Wellbeing
Exploring the patterns surrounding physical activity, fitness, nutrition, sleep, energy, stress, recovery and the relationship between physical and psychological wellbeing.
Life & Personal Development
Understanding where you are, where you would like to be and what might be getting in the way. This might include confidence, motivation, self-awareness, decision-making or a more general sense that something needs to change.
Mindset & Underlying Assumptions
Exploring habitual ways of thinking and the beliefs and assumptions about ourselves and the world that can quietly shape our behaviour, sometimes without us realising it.
Performance
Helping you perform more effectively in the things that matter to you, whether in work, sport or everyday life, while understanding the wider conditions that support sustainable performance.
Change & Transition
Working through periods in which established ways of living or thinking no longer seem to fit, including changes in career, retirement, health, identity or direction.
Purpose, Values & Meaning
Exploring what matters to you, the values by which you want to live and whether the life you're actually living reflects them.
Looking at the system, not just the symptom
I am particularly interested in connections.
If somebody tells me that they need to get fitter, for example, we certainly could start by designing an exercise programme. But I might first become curious about what changed.
Why were they previously active but aren't now? What else was happening when that change occurred? What has happened to their sleep, eating, energy, work, stress or motivation? What do they tell themselves about being “fit” or “unfit”? And which of these things are causes, which are consequences, and which continually reinforce one another? Sometimes the most obvious problem isn't necessarily the best place to intervene.
By understanding the wider pattern first, we can look for the changes most likely to have leverage elsewhere.
A coaching relationship, not a prescription
You know considerably more about living your life than I ever will.
My role isn't to provide a set of instructions for you to follow. It's to bring curiosity, challenge, experience and an outside perspective to something you're currently experiencing from the inside.
I'll ask questions. I'll challenge assumptions. I'll sometimes offer ideas, models or observations from my own experience and professional background. Most importantly, I'll help you investigate rather than simply accept the explanations you've already given yourself.
Between us, we build a clearer picture of what's happening and decide what experiments or changes might be worth making. Then we see what happens.
When work enters the conversation
Our personal and professional lives don't exist independently of one another.
Work pressures, leadership responsibilities, running a business, financial concerns and career decisions can all form part of the wider pattern we're exploring. Where they're relevant to your personal wellbeing, development or circumstances, they're entirely appropriate subjects for personal coaching.
Personal coaching is, however, distinct from the executive, leadership and business coaching I provide through Refinity. If the focus of our work shifts substantially towards you as a leader, your organisation, business performance or business development, we'll discuss whether a different coaching arrangement would be more appropriate.
1-to-1 Personal Coaching
I generally prefer to work in two-hour sessions.
I've found that this gives us enough space to get beyond the presenting issue, explore what's happening properly and allow useful connections to emerge without feeling that we're working against the clock.
For somebody beginning a piece of coaching where there is quite a lot to explore, I might recommend starting with a two-hour session every fortnight. As things become clearer, we can deliberately spread the sessions further apart.
Two-hour sessions aren't a requirement, though.
Coaching needs to fit around real lives and real diaries. If one-hour sessions or another arrangement works better for your circumstances, we can agree a combination of session length and frequency that works for us both.
Why a regular subscription?
For ongoing coaching, I use a simple subscription arrangement. This isn't intended to lock anybody into coaching indefinitely. Quite the opposite.
Regular coaching works best when there is enough rhythm and continuity for a genuine coaching relationship to develop. Each conversation can build upon the last, while the time between sessions gives you an opportunity to notice patterns, experiment with changes and bring what you discover back into the next conversation.
As things become clearer and you become increasingly confident working with them yourself, we can reduce the frequency. We might, for example, begin fortnightly, move to monthly and eventually stop altogether.
The aim isn't to keep you in coaching. It's to make the coaching useful for as long as you need it.
Personal Coaching Fees
The arrangements below are examples rather than rigid packages. If a different session length better suits our combined diaries or your circumstances, I'm happy to be flexible. The appropriate hourly rate is determined by the regularity of the coaching arrangement.
Fortnightly sessions
- Typical arrangement: 2 hours every 2 weeks
- Hourly rate: £60/hour
Monthly sessions
- Typical arrangement: 2 hours every 4 weeks
- Hourly rate: £65/hour
One-off / ad hoc sessions
- Typical arrangement: 2-hour session
- £70/hour
In person or online
Coaching can take place in person or virtually.
Where we've planned to meet in person but circumstances make that impractical, we'll normally meet online instead rather than unnecessarily interrupting the coaching.
This also means that travel, holidays or location don't necessarily need to disrupt the rhythm of our work. If we're both available and able to work effectively together, geography needn't get in the way.
Changes, cancellations and pauses
Regular coaching arrangements can be changed, paused for extended absences, or cancelled at any time. Where you've already paid for the current coaching period, we'll complete the sessions covered by that payment and the change will take effect from the next billing cycle.
If you need to change a scheduled session, I'll be happy to reschedule it provided the replacement session takes place before your next scheduled session. If we're unable to do that, the session is considered used.
Where an in-person meeting becomes impractical but we're both still available, we'll normally meet virtually instead.
If I need to cancel a session and we're unable to rearrange it appropriately, you won't lose the coaching time you've paid for. We'll either rearrange it outside the normal period or make an appropriate adjustment to your next payment.
These arrangements aren't intended to be inflexible. Quite the opposite. They give us flexibility while protecting the rhythm and continuity that make regular coaching effective, rather than allowing unused sessions to accumulate.
Where do we start?
We start with what's happening now.
You don't need to arrive with a perfectly defined goal or even a clear understanding of the problem. Indeed, discovering what the real question is can be an important part of the work.
If you'd like to explore whether personal coaching might be useful, get in touch and we'll start with a conversation.
Also offerring...
Helping People Lead Fulfilled Lives
When it comes to your own personal growth, it's important to remember that there is no magic exercise or secret mindset that will take you to where you want to go. Self-development takes time, and it usually requires a lot of work.
However, with Refinity, I am trying to give an experience like no other - one that allows people to fully immerse themselves in their personal growth journey through self-development practices designed to get results.
If you're feeling as though you're stuck in the same cycle day in, day out then I invite you to immerse yourself in the Refinity experience. It's one that will change your life completely.
Sean Barkes
Access Sean's wide knowledge base spanning multiple disciplines with the shared connection of self-improvement.
Sean has had a lifelong passion in martial arts, athletics, self development and healthcare. These disciplines give him personal insight into how mental and physical health can take personal performance to new levels.
Sean also gives a huge amount of importance to the process of self-reflection, vision, planning and action. Helping both himself and others achieve feats they might never have thought possible.
“A business's greatest asset is the ideas generated by its people. My niche is to uncover and nurture these ideas whilst helping clients achieve the clarity required to reach that critical level of confidence necessary to act decisively.”
Sean Barkes
What Makes Refinity’s Approach Unique?
By offering extensive insight and the expertise that comes from experience in multiple industries, operations and procedures, Refinity’s approach is a reflection of Sean’s unique combination of healthcare, sporting and business experience.
I help to stimulate your creativity, support intelligent planning and encourage decisive action to help you look beyond your sense of self and the way that you interact with the world around you. Helping you to achieve your goals, whether that's to run a more effective business or to achieve a better sense of fulfillment. You can start your journey with Refinity today, by starting your Refinity Quest.