FAQs

Coaching is a unique discipline aimed at generating and supporting inner transformation in order to change how you experience your life. Coaching comes in a lot of varieties, but the end-game is always self-determination — the ability to take ownership of your own life and destiny.

This can absolutely be in pursuit of specific, tangible achievements (like professional, personal, financial, health, relationship, or creative output goals). But we certainly don’t need big goals to precipitate a desire for a richer and more aligned life. Wanting to feel more like yourself, and more autonomous, is reason enough to get coached. Success in your life will almost always flow more easily from this place. Coaching helps you tap into this while reaching your peak agency, engagement, creativity, and resilience.

At its core, coaching typically focuses on a few facets:

• Cognition (your thoughts)
• Emotions (your feelings)
• Behavior (your actions and habits)
• Outcomes (the results in your life – whether tangible/external or intangible/internal)

A coaching session might maintain a core focus on cognitive work, like rewiring your thought patterns, while incorporating somatic exercises, visualizations, meditations, and values-based explorations. My approach blends most of these tools, with emphasis on deconstructing and transforming your beliefs and thought patterns.

Here are some things I don't do as a coach (and because the coaching industry is unregulated and full of a lot of unhelpful practices, I have a longer blog post on this topic):‍

I’m not a therapist. Coaching and therapy have different goals, and you can certainly benefit from both at the same time. If our conversation ever goes in a direction that would be better suited for therapy, I’ll be transparent and immediate in letting you know. You can still get coached if you experience anxiety, depression, ADHD,  or other psychological challenges, but our scope will stay limited and we won’t veer into psychotherapeutic territory.

Of course, everything in our psyches and consciousness is intrinsically connected, and sometimes the boundaries of past, present, and future become blurred — but I will keep us in the general direction of future-oriented goals, rather than past-oriented processing. Whereas therapy is (sometimes) a more stream-of-consciousness way of relating, coaching asks more of the client in terms of co-creating expectations and direction.

I don't “give advice” (unless you ask or I get your permission), and I'm not an authority figure on your life. Good coaching is actually not about giving advice at all, but about reflecting your mind, actions and emotions back to you. I might point out (based on my own perception..there is a subjective component here) what I see, how something is holding you back, and the ways you could implement changes to better serve you and align with your deeper goals.

But my specialty is in guiding you (back) to your own solutions, not telling you what to do to. We'll work on this together by transforming your mindset and dismantling your blueprints and limiting beliefs. And, we’ll certainly get tactical sometimes, e.g. focusing on tools, habits, or daily practices as well as new thought patterns. The point is that we co-design solutions together. I see you as the expert of your own life.

I’m not a member of the prosperity gospel/manifestation/life coach pyramid scheme-industrial-complex. Look, we all live in capitalism, but I’m trying my best not to be part of the problem. I’m eternally skeptical of dogmatic beliefs that claim to hold all the answers to success — and I strive to be mindful of this rhetoric in the language I use.

There are certainly coaches out there much more rooted in social justice, anticapitalist principles than I am...but my practice is rooted in strong convictions and beliefs. I'm not neutral, and I won't shamelessly perpetuate patriarchal, supremacist, or excessively capitalist messaging. (I don't see how anyone working adjacent to the mental health field can not grapple with these complexities...this period of history is too vulnerable not to.)

Anyway, I also can’t say for sure if manifestation works (although I’m not saying it doesn’t work..), I’m not confident that the universe unequivocally “has your back”, and rest assured I will never tell you to just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get on with it. But I do believe you have more agency than you think, and I will push you in that direction.

Non-hierarchical coaching is a relational approach that treats us as equal partners, and it’s the framework I draw from.  I am not here to give you unprompted advice, have an agenda for your life, or believe that I have all the answers. I’m here to guide and support you in uncovering your own answers, with the assumption that you are powerful, generative, creative, and already whole as you are.

It has been proven that the most effective behavioral change (even by non-coach, counseling-adjacent professionals, such as doctors, nutritionists, and fitness trainers) comes from a place of co-creation and collaboration, not from an authority / recipient dynamic -- imbalanced power dynamics like this strip us of our perceived agency and motivation.

In working together, we’ll leverage our unique positions as coach and coachee, where I’m the expert in the coaching process and you’re the expert in your life.

Showing up! You’re investing financial and energetic resources into this process, so the only real requirement is to take that as seriously as you can and want to.

Here are some helpful questions to ask yourself:

Am I committed to the process? Can I be present, implement meaningful changes, and understand that the majority of the work occurs outside of our sessions?

Do I have a desire for transformation? Whatever transformation looks like for me, am I open to the ways in which I will be different in 3 or 6 months?

Am I open to accountability? Am I ready to be held accountable to actionable takeaways in between sessions, knowing I will never be judged or critiqued, but pushed out of my comfort zone?

Do I have courage to face the hard stuff? Am I prepared to potentially run into difficult emotions like shame, resistance, grief, or anger, knowing that’s totally normal and I will be supported each step of the way?

Sometimes :)

Short answer: Yes.

I completed a 6-month certification program in 2021 at The Life Coach School, and I am always continuing my own self-study and pursuing new trainings. I draw especially from cognitive behavioral theory, intersectional feminism, and humanistic psychology.

Long answer: Coaching is an unregulated industry, and certifications don’t mean much. This is a good and bad thing. It allows for a huge spectrum of approaches, modalities, niches, etc., and it also can cause real harm to people due to a lack of standardization, training requirements, or a unified code of ethics. Whether you’re thinking of working with me or another coach, keep this in mind — trust your instincts more than a list of credentials!

There are a ton of certification programs out there rooted in different methodologies and belief systems, all at varying degrees of depth, breadth, and quality. Personally, I chose a program whose teachings draws from CBT (cognitive behavioral theory) because it resonated most with me at the time.

CBT tells us that our thoughts are powerful agents of change, as well as of self-limitation – our thoughts create our emotions, which affect our actions, which produce our outcomes. If we get on board with this, we have a lot of opportunity to reclaim agency and generate change. It’s a theory and tool I find extremely powerful.

And, this theory alone is not all-encompassing. Our psyches, emotions, behaviors, and the world we live in are incredibly complex and mysterious, and I leave plenty of room for that in my coaching approach. Frameworks are helpful, dogmatism is not.

Absolutely. Your job is to show up to this process ready to be challenged, vulnerable, and focused, in order to create change in your inner world and outer life. My job is to provide a container for you to do this.

If you bring things to that container that I am not qualified or able to help you with, or that don’t quite fit within the parameters of coaching,  I will always hold space for you but I will be transparent about our scope and refer you to therapy. (Or, encourage you to take this topic to your current therapist.) Read more about my thoughts on this here.

While you can get plenty of value from a single coaching session, I’ve found that meeting for twelve sessions is the minimum for real transformation to occur. This is why I exclusively offer a 12-session minumum for new clients. In a 3-month time frame, we’ll meet weekly, allowing you to dive right in and commit to a process of transformation in one season or quarter.

With that said, if you prefer going at a slower pace over 6 months, we can meet biweekly. This gives you more time in between sessions to metabolize and play around with our takeaways in your real life. The amount of sessions is the same, the duration of our time together is the only variable. This is up to personal preference, taking into consideration other goals, factors or time-bound commitments in your life.

If you want to dive deeper right away with a longer-term commitment (e.g. 6 months), we can absolutely discuss that. An up-front commitment might be a good option if you have specific longer-term goals in mind, if you need to use up a professional development stipend by a certain date, or other unique circumstances. Book an intro call and we'll explore options together.

Yes, for returning clients. I offer one-time sessions or smaller ad-hoc packages for past clients with whom I already have a foundation and a starting point.

If you're a former client looking for targeted support with a problem, decision, or short-term goal or change of direction, this could be a good option.

Over the course of 30 minutes (sometimes longer if needed) we will: get acquainted, talk about your desires and what you’re hoping to gain from coaching, and cover basic logistics. If you’re interested, we’ll dive into 15-20 minutes of targeted coaching so you can get a taste of the process.

I offer a limited number of slots per quarter at 30%, 50% or 75% of my full package rate. (Kind of like “pay-what-you-wish”, you choose the most doable tier based on your current circumstances — but please choose the level that reflects both what you can afford and the value this will create in your life.)

This might be for you if:

• You can afford your basic living expenses, but are in a tight place
• You live with a chronic illness or disability that prevents you from earning consistent income
• You are committed to the process and feel you would benefit from working together, but are coming out of a period of financial hardship

This is not for you if you are financially comfortable but uncomfortable investing a large sum in your own self-development. If you have scarcity challenges, we can work on them in coaching!

More thoughts: Coaching and personal development are not automatically in our budgets, so we have to make budgets or plans that factor it in. Consider if you can get your employer to contribute via a wellness or professional-development stipend; if your community (family, friends) can lend or gift you money, e.g. for a birthday or special occasion; or if you can make any trade-offs for a few months or plan future anticipated income, like a bonus, around this.

Cosmic Tangent is just two words that I think sound really cool. I don’t really know why we’re here (neither do you), but sometimes I think of Life on Earth as a weird tangent the gods created for entertainment, or something...

Plus, my name is really long, and "Alexandra Mirabella Caturano Coaching" just isn't as easy to say :)