Do you have friends, family members or a spouse who are stuck in a rut regarding work, health, family or other issues and have been expressing the need to get unstuck?  Consider giving them a coaching gift this holiday season.

There are several ways to do this.  Since most coaches offer a complimentary initial session, you could offer to pay for the second and third session or more.  Another approach would be to pay 50% of the cost of a number of coaching sessions.  Or consider paying the full cost of coaching sessions initially and reducing the percentage over time. There is a catch, however: you can’t choose the coach — clients need to choose the coach.

Clients need to engage with two or more coaches to make sure that they feel comfortable with the “fit” of the coach that they finally choose.  The client’s act of choosing can be energizing in itself and also builds commitment to making needed changes with the help of a coach.  To learn more about how a prospective client could go about this process see how to select a leadership coach.  This article is written about leadership coaching but the same approach will work well for finding any type of coach.

The gift of coaching should also include links for local and national directories of coaches so that the recipients can see the diverse array of coaching that’s available as well as the wide range of coaching styles.  A local or regional coaching website could look like the one for the Western Mass Coaching Alliance.  One excellent coaching site for all of North America is Noomii which allows users to select coaches by category and zip code.

One other important consideration: don’t ask the recipient of a coaching gift about how the coaching is going.  That would be highly inappropriate and intrusive.  The relationship between the coach and client is a confidential one.  If the recipient wants to share how coaching is going with you, that’s fine, but don’t expect them to do this.

And finally, the cost of coaching may be tax deductible in certain situations, not for you (unless the recipient is your employee), but for the client.