Our Wise Monkey Love Your Coaching partnership sees its first graduates
Apr 17, 2024
I’m delighted to report our partnership with Charlie Warshawski at Love Your Coaching is now bearing its first fruit.
The very first Wise Monkey alumni to sign up for the bespoke ILM L5 coaching and mentoring qualification have now emerged, enthused, and qualified.
Coaching sits at the heart of all we do and believe in at Wise Monkey, and I’ve long wanted to find or build a pathway to enhance the credibility and professional standards for financial coaching in the UK. Now we’ve taken a vital next step.
We pack a lot into the immersive, blended training and learning experience of Wise Monkey’s Financial Coach Practitioner Certificate training. But to complement and build on this with a further nationally recognised coaching qualification, offered by Love Your Coaching, is a wonderful new initiative I’m proud has now become a reality.
It’s the perfect next step for any Wise Monkey alumni who completed our training at least a year ago, and have been practising regularly as a financial coach since. And I’m delighted to be partnering with Charlie, who is such a gifted and generous trainer, and goes way beyond in his dedication to teaching.
The first two graduates of the new programme are both enthusiastic about the experience.
Deeper understanding
Nicholas Lee says the ILM L5 training has been the most ‘fantastic follow up’ to the Wise Monkey programme, for him. ‘I worked very hard,’ he says, ‘and got a lot out of it. In particular, I massively valued the feedback sessions from Charlie and his team.’
Nicholas even speaks of a ‘road to Damascus moment’ – when Charlie gave him feedback on one of his recorded coaching sessions.
‘Charlie told me he recognised the exact moment when I overstepped the mark with my client. He fed that back to me quietly and clearly. At first I had an awful feeling of failure; then I saw, there’s your learning experience… I did the reflection, and saw: there’s my Achilles heel. It’s proved an invaluable insight.’
Nicholas says the training was ‘extraordinarily well taught. Charlie is an absolutely brilliant teacher – really quiet and really clever. He encourages you to do the work.’
He believes the ILM training has given him ‘a deeper understanding of how to create a coaching relationship with a client. How to structure it; how to contract with a client; how to set the tone – putting them at the centre.’
Nicholas says, as a financial coach, he now knows with more confidence, he’s doing a good job. ‘It’s always been a complex balancing act: being a financial ‘expert’ – holding some key information – and a responsible coach. The ILM training has helped me enormously with understanding how to strike that balance’, he says.
Perfect timing
Claire Saunders says she ‘LOVED the ILM training. I was interested in attaining a recognisable coaching qualification from the start of my financial coaching journey, so signing up for this was a no brainer, for me.’
‘I trust Simonne implicitly,’ she says, ‘and knew she’d have done the research and found the best partner. It was also the perfect timing for me, in my own development. I was best placed to get the most out of it – a few years into my own financial coaching practice. Confident enough in my own skills to be really open and willing to learn more from it. So, for me, the ILM experience came at exactly the right time.’
‘It massively complemented the Wise Monkey training’, says Claire. ‘It’s a great partnership between the two. Coaching is anyway and always a journey: requiring you to shift the way in which you think, hear and ask. People can get stuck: and this is the perfect learning opportunity to overcome barriers.’
‘What was so useful about the ILM training,’ says Claire, ‘is the focus was solely on coaching. It’s not focused on finance. During the training, I found myself coaching clients with issues other than finance, and that was really freeing – to explore methods I hadn’t come across before. I learnt lots of new techniques and tools which were also fun to practise – and have brought them back now into my own financial coaching practice, at Mint Coaching.’
Claire says she found it ‘both eye opening and mind opening! And Charlie was inspiring. I like his manner – he’s everything, I imagine, a brilliant coach to be. His feedback is immensely useful and constructive – telling each of us, what went well; what could go even better. He’s open and honest; and I felt both seen and accepted by him.’
‘I highly recommend the ILM Level 5 training to other Wise Monkey alumni – once they’ve been out in the world for a while, and built up their own financial coaching practice. It was, without doubt, the right next step for me.’
The next bespoke ILM training for Wise Monkey alumni starts on 24th April 2025. If you’re reading this, and interested, get in contact or CLICK HERE TO FIND OUT MORE.
