Power of Assessments

How do you know where someone stands in what means the most to them? How do you know what they want to work on? In Coaching we have so many different tools that are a strong resource to helping us figure this out. These are assessments. At the beginning of my experience with these assessments and with my coaching clients I picked out a few that I felt were applicable.

The first one is the Life Wheel. I love this assessment. I love that one can look at these different sections of their life and find which ones matter most. I did this for my self. and found that my Spirituality was my highest. It was the one that I care the most about with my self-image the least, the one I need to work the most on. As I did this with my clients I got a response back of many wows, I didn't know that that was so important to me. And now I can see what I want to work on.
                                            
The second one that I liked to do was a visioning exercise. This helped people to look at what they desired most by imagining the perfect day. Life isn't perfect and never will be! I think that is very important to know. However, imagining gives you an idea of what you want your life to be and then having a Coach can help you to achieve the goals you wish to set to achieve that dream. I did this with one of my clients and it was an amazing experience. It led the rest of the sessions and helped not only myself, the coach, but also my client to know what she wanted to work on. These visioning exercised can be anything but they are there to help one see the potential they have.

The third is something that I haven't used yet in my coaching but came across in my Adult Development class. It is a Competence and Environmental Press graph which is used to measure your competence and environmental press when dealing with stress. I wish I knew about this well before I started my coaching because it is such an amazing graph and helps one visualize how competent they are with their stress and the environmental press that is causing the stress as well.

I tried my best to draw this graph on the computer so here it is. What one would do is they would plot where they feel they were. Did they have high levels of environmental press or low levels and then take it to their competence, low levels or high. One wants to be in the zone of max comfort not in either of the maladaptive parts of the graph. I feel like if I knew about this I could help a client take each of their stressors and then plot them on this graph and then plot the overall number and see where they fall. This would give them a visual of where they are in handling each stressor that is in their life and if they wanted to proceed we would go from there. 

Assessments help one to see where they are at as well as need to be legit. The last one that I mentioned is not an assessment and/or has been tested. I do feel like it is a beneficial tool that could be used.