<aside> 💡 Skip to: Program Summary | Program Development | Coaching Model | Goal Setting | Guidelines for Coaches | Guidelines for Coachees
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<aside> ✨ This program is intended to help the coachee develop the insight and tools to be able to proceed on their journey with goals and an articulated way forward in mind.
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Creating Your "What's Next?": A Coaching Journey for Professional or Career Advancement (often abbreviated to "What's Next?") is a coaching program intended to provide Out in Tech members who identify as LGBTQ+ with coaching assistance in their career or professional advancement while considering where they are in their life journey. Participants ("coachees") will be coached by Out in Tech volunteers ("coaches") following simple guidelines and best practices from the coaching industry. Coaches will offer support and encouragement, act as a sounding board for possibilities, and serve as an aide in personal accountability towards growth.
We are looking for participants who are working and/or have advanced education; are looking to make career changes, such as advancement within a company or to another company; are looking to completely change into a different field of work; and/or are shifting from corporate/salaried employment to solopreneur/entrepreneurial businesses or practices.
This program is not offering life coaching, which typically focuses on relationships, home, family, and - for LGBTQ+ people - lifestyle, coming out, socialization, or very specific issues such as self-care for those living with HIV/AIDS, dealing with transphobia and racism within minority or typically non-gay-positive cultures, or coaching combined with therapy.
As Out in Tech is tech-centric, the work, jobs, businesses, and educational interests that coachees will bring to the table are expected to be tech-focused: even if they desire to switch to a career in soft sciences or the arts, for example, they likely would be coming from a tech career in order to be aware of this program.
While the Out in Tech U Mentorship Program is dedicated to mentorship for people who are at the start of their journey and is based on a mentor/mentee relationship model, the What's Next? adult coaching program does not require that coaches have a skill set or work history matching their coachee to ensure a correct fit: empathy, emotional intelligence, active listening skills, along with the ability to assist coachees in drawing their own conclusions, setting goals, finding strengths, identifying opportunities, and being accountable to themselves are the only prerequisites to be a successful coach.
This program was designed by a professional LGBTQ+ Coach, combining elements of practical activities and tools from the disciplines of positive psychology, mindfulness, and emotional intelligence to encourage a growth mindset along with spiritual and somatic health. It is intended to account for the whole person, even though the program is more narrowly focused on careers of the OiT membership. Some of these tools have been modified from those used generically for all populations to offer our LGBTQ+ community a more inviting and safe environment to use the coaching process to make change possible, while accounting for particular issues and influencers (internal and external) that we face apart from our non-LGBTQ+ colleagues, friends, and family.
<aside> ⚠️ Note: this program is not intended to serve as a training program for coaches or those looking to acquire specific credentials or accreditation with any coaching organization, program, or entity. Many of the suggested tools, examples, and activities are, however, used by professional coaches, counselors, therapists, professional guides, and spiritual directors. What is offered here have been found to be good examples and models. Some are free, some are open source, and some come from published materials and have been properly sourced and quoted, to serve as springboards for deeper work.
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The GROW Model was originally developed in the 1980s by business coaches Graham Alexander, Alan Fine, and Sir John Whitmore.
GROW stands for:
The GROW model has been used for over 40 years in leadership coaching, life coaching, and other varieties of non-athletic or non-peer coaching. In this model, the coach doesn't make decisions or function as a subject matter expert for the coachee. Instead the coach facilitates the process, helping the coachee to step through the model in order to make well-vetted decisions, create an action plan, prepare to be accountable (to themselves), and progress forward accordingly.
The coachee is therefore both in charge of putting the model to use and responsible for the results.
A good way of visualizing the GROW model in action is to see it as a journey:
In narrative fashion, the coachee becomes the hero of the hero's journey, a classic way to describe change and transformation.