Whether you are a seasoned coach or a new one, exceptional executive coaching can be achieved by accessing the great coach within yourself. This book is your resource to become an exceptional coach by showing you how your experiences, knowledge, and intuition can be leveraged to inspire your clients. To be sure, there are critical skills to master and practices to follow, but at the heart of it is the connection you create between your unique coaching approach and your client. Becoming an Exceptional Executive Coach is the first book to bring these diverse elements together to guide you in developing your own personal model of coaching. Using this book, you will learn about core coaching competencies across three broad categories—building relationships, communicating, and fostering learning—and identify your own areas of strength in each. As you begin to outline your personal model of coaching, you’ll get practical reinforcement in the form of real-life case examples and master coach commentary that will help expand your frame of reference and repertoire of skills in helping your clients. Becoming an Exceptional Executive Coach shows you how to manage a coaching relationship professionally and consistently, encourage trust, manage the engagement, and garner organizational support. You’ll learn how to: • Use and leverage your particular knowledge, skills, and intuition for each coaching engagement • Build your confidence and competence as an executive coach • Gather the information you’ll need to help clients articulate and meet ambitious goals • Give appropriate and useful feedback • Plan for your client’s long-term development • Help your client use your partnership as a catalyst for positive change • Develop your client’s leadership potential • Work through inevitable challenges • Bring your coach/client relationships to empowering conclusions • Build on the highlights of the relationship to foster continuing client progress, and your own learning • And much more The book is filled with clear descriptions of executive coaching practices; case examples from multiple perspectives; sample coaching documents, such as contracts and development plans; and guidelines for creating your own unique model of executive coaching. You may have thought that becoming an executive coach was too big a stretch. This book shows how you can become an exceptional coach in your own way. iCoachNewYork is a consulting and training firm that focuses on the development of executive coaches, both internal and external. The firm consists of five highly experienced executive coaches who together create and deliver training to other professional coaches. Since 2004, iCoachNewYork has delivered the one-of-a-kind Professional Coaching Certificate Program at the Zicklin Business School of Baruch College, CUNY, as well as in-house customized Internal Coach training programs. Michael H. Frisch, Robert J. Lee, Karen L. Metzger, Jeremy Robinson, and Judy Rosemarin are New York City-based executive coaches and trainers with substantial corporate, consulting, and academic experience.