Coach FEATURE: Meet Wendy Buckingham

We continue to meet our fellow coaches - and build coach community with these features! This month we meet Wendy Buckingham, a longtime Launchpad reader with a ton of life experience! Read on to learn more...

About Wendy Buckingham:

From: Mollymook, NSW, Australia

Business name: Wendy Buckingham

Describe your coaching business in one sentence: I facilitate positive, lasting change in the lives of my clients. I do this by helping them to define and achieve their goals and outcomes on all types of issues, from confidence and health, to business, career and relationships.

Meet Wendy:

QUESTION 1: What one book should every coach read - and why?

The E-Myth by Michael Gerber is really useful for small business people to help them understand the traps of trying to do it all themselves.

My own book - Be Your Own Goals Coach. This doesn't come from arrogance, just the feedback I've had over the years on how useful it is for all aspects of life. I recently wrote an extra chapter to help coaches use the book with their clients.

QUESTION 2: Which website do you visit the most?

My coaching information website Life Coaching Professionally because I am constantly updating it! Lately I have been visiting the Coaches Helping Coaches Facebook Group just as much as it provides so many opportunities to help and encourage new coaches as well as put forward my views on coaching issues 🙂

QUESTION 3: Whom do you admire most?

Apart from my wonderful husband, it would be Naturalist David Attenborough. He encapsulates someone who has a made a career of doing something he loves that is making a huge difference to the planet and humankind.

QUESTION 4: What's your vision for your life? Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Alive and healthy 🙂 and travelling more. I'm semi-retired now but in five years time I will still be coaching and mentoring a few clients and coaches remotely.

QUESTION 5: What is your "Big Project" at the moment?

My biggest project is to monetize my Life Coaching Professionally site to its full potential. I built it over 8 years ago and at that time had only an altruistic interest in providing information to new and aspiring coaches. Now I want to use it to leverage my coaching with products and affiliates that really add value.  I'm fortunate to have the help of my husband who is an online business coach.

My other goal is to spend a few months next year slow touring in the UK next year whilst we both work.

QUESTION 6: What has been your favourite coaching moment so far?

After so many years in the profession it's hard to come up with a single moment. Those that come to mind are when a client at the end of a series, or later in an email, acknowledges the shifts they have made and the goals they have achieved and the benefit they have received from being coached.

QUESTION 7: What are your Top 3 favourite coaching tools and/or resources?

1. Identify Needs: I learned this in my CoachU training and I use it constantly to help clients identify what drives them, and how not to let their needs sabotage their wants and goals.
2. Session Preparation Form: This is invaluable in helping clients anchor their wins etc. since the last session and highlight what issues may need coaching. It saves a bunch of time in the session.
3. Again, my book. I give a copy of it to each new client and refer to it when appropriate to reinforce what they need to do.

QUESTION 8: What do you love most about being a coach?

Being of a certain age, the fact that it is an ageless profession where having lived a full life is a real advantage. Also, the joy of seeing clients break through their blocks and more confidently go from where they are to where they want to be.

I also love working with so many different and interesting people who I get to know and learn so much from.

QUESTION 9: Tell us a secret about you...

It took me four goes at marriage get it right - I was a keen but slow learner :). My soulmate Paul and I have now been together for 30 years. I am also mad about steam trains and once even got to drive one.

QUESTION 10: If you could change one thing in our world, what would it be? And how would you go about it?

Oh boy. Where do I start. I would change the intolerance between races and religions and the need for each one to feel they are "right" and the only path. To be right you don't have to make someone else wrong.

How would I go about it? Not sure I can. Education I guess and more multiculturalism without forfeiting individual traditions.

On a smaller but just as important scale I hate the over packaging of goods and would make it mandatory to have all packaging recyclable or biodegradable.

LEARN MORE about Wendy Buckingham here: Visit Wendy's website >>  Life Coaching Professionally Follow Wendy on  Facebook!

If you liked this "Meet the Coach" article featuring Wendy Buckingham, you may also like:

• Coach FEATURE: Meet Karlene Roberts!
• Succeed in Life INFOGRAPHIC to Share | 12 Tips on How to Succeed!
• 10 Inspiring and Awesome Coaching Quotes ABOUT Coaching! [for you to share]