Coaching is one of the most valuable investments you can make as an artist. Not only having someone on your side, but having someone who encourages you to move out of your comfort zone, to actually help you start to plan and do all those things you have wanted to do but never got round to, or were too scared to put into place.

I am a qualified coach and have been through the training, so I know how important it is and how much it can help a person.

Now, I don’t want to generalise, but we as artists tend to be emotional people. We care too much about what people think, and that can really set us back. One negative comment and that’s it.

Being able to work through the moments when our confidence drops, or our mind set isn’t quite as healthy as it could be, is so incredibly important. Finding a qualified coach to help you, as I said earlier, is one of the best investments you can make for both yourself and your business.

And yes, a qualified coach really is key. You wouldn’t take on an unqualified sports coach, music coach, riding coach, and there’s a reason for that.

When it comes to coaching, there is a line that you must be careful not to cross, and that is into counselling, unless, of course, the coach is also a qualified counsellor.

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Those who aren’t qualified run the risk of ending up advising their clients based on their own personal experience, which classes as mentoring and not coaching. You can very often end up in a situation where something comes up that needs counselling help and, if the coach isn’t qualified, they may not recognise when this happens. If they go down the route of trying to help someone who really does need counselling, they can cause a huge amount of harm.

Choose a coach who is properly qualified as a business coach via one of the governing bodies. In the UK the ILM (Institute of Leadership & Management) is one of the main accreditors.

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And, if you were wondering what you will get from a qualified coach opposed to someone who hasn’t had any training, the answer is that coaching is all about you. It’s not about me, what I’ve done, what I advise. It’s all about you and what you want to achieve, what you need to do to get where you want to be.

A qualified coach will be able to carve conversations around all these, and will get you really thinking and coming up with your own solutions rather than advising you or telling you what you should do. They may also have exercises they can offer that would help. There are some amazing coaching models that, when introduced, can really make sense of things.

A qualified coach will have had to have completed over 200 hours of coaching, will have had to have gone through a huge amount of self-reflection and will have created a dissertation to gain their degree.

I have a coach, and I have a session every week which is invaluable for me and my business. Sometimes I, like everyone else, don’t want to address certain things, but having someone qualified to pick up on things – body language in particular is hugely important – can make a huge difference to our lives.

It’s because of the help this coach is giving me that I wanted to encourage others to seek similar assistance. To begin with, I understand that it might just sound like another expense you’d rather not pay out for, but from my experience, I really do believe that it will help you in ways you didn’t expect, and work wonders for your confidence, creativity, and, of course, your business!