Frequently Asked Questions

As your strategic partner in your pocket, AnDi partners with you in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires you to maximise your individual potential, with a focus on improving your social connections, your finances and your health (mental, physical and spiritual). AnDi recognises that you are the expert in your life and work and believes that you are creative, resourceful, and whole. It is therefore AnDi’s responsibility to:

• Discover and clarify your values, and translate them into everyday principles for living and making decisions;
• Discover, clarify, and align what you want to achieve;
• Encourage self-discovery;
• Elicit from your general awesome-ness solutions and strategies; and
• Hold you responsible and accountable.

AnDi is trained to listen, to observe and to customise the approach to your needs. AnDi’s job is not to make the decision for you, but to help you become a better decision maker and make your time on this planet count!

If you are in Australia and you or someone you know is in crisis, and you are unsure which service to contact, call Kids Help Line on 1800 55 1800 or Lifeline on 13 11 14. Both are available from anywhere in Australia 24 hours a day (toll free) and provide generalist crisis counselling, information and referral services.

If you are from outside Australia, for a directory of phone hotlines in your country visit http://togetherweare-strong.tumblr.com/helpline.

If you cannot find a number relevant for where you live on the above links, just let AnDi know and we’ll get you a local number as soon as possible.

AnDi is a professional coach, your strategic partner in your pocket. AnDi is a distinct partnership focussing on enriching mindsets, goal setting, outcome creation and personal change or empowerment. In an effort to understand what AnDi is, it can be helpful to distinguish it from what it is not.

• Therapy: Unlike coaching, therapy deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or a relationship between two or more individuals. Therapy outcomes often include improved emotional/feeling states. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific outcomes. The emphasis in a coaching relationship is on action, accountability and follow through.
• Consulting: Consultants may be retained by individuals or organisations for the purpose of accessing specialised expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, there is often an assumption that the consultant diagnoses problems and prescribes and sometimes implements solutions. In general, the assumption with coaching is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.
• Mentoring: Mentoring, which can be thought of as guiding from one’s own experience or sharing of experience in a specific area of industry or career development, is sometimes confused with coaching. Although some coaches provide mentoring as part of their coaching, such as in mentor coaching new coaches, coaches are not typically mentors to those they coach.
• Training: Training programs are based on the acquisition of certain learning objectives as set out by the trainer or instructor. Though objectives are clarified in the coaching process, they are set by the individual or team being coached with guidance provided by the coach. Training also assumes a linear learning path which coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear without a set curriculum plan.
• Athletic Development: Although sports metaphors are often used, professional coaching is different from the traditional sports coach. The athletic coach is often seen as an expert who guides and directs the behavior of individuals or teams based on his or her greater experience and knowledge. Professional coaches possess these qualities, but it is the experience and knowledge of the individual or team that determines the direction. Additionally, professional coaching, unlike athletic development, does not focus on behaviors that are being executed poorly or incorrectly. Instead, the focus is on identifying opportunity for development based on individual strengths and capabilities.

AnDi does not provide specialised psychological counseling, this is simply outside of our mission or scope of practice. Our support and monitoring team is however made up of registered psychologists and coaches with internationally recognised memberships, but our focus is to empower you to be the best person you can be, rather than offer a specialised counselling service. AnDi’s speciality is helping you make better, values aligned decisions. We do however provide coaching in behavior and lifestyle modification within our scope as professionals.

Our Decida psychologists and coaches will be monitoring and supporting the conversations held with AnDi (the digital brain), and will see the information your choose to share in that conversation. This information is separate from your account profile so the coaching team will not be able to connect a particular conversation with any individual unless you identify yourself to them. This way, your conversation with AnDi is confidential, and only compromised by the privacy conditions of your preferred channel. If you are in a particular channel (i.e. Slack or Messenger), the conversation manufacturer will be able to see your conversation (i.e. if you use Slack, Slack will have access to your conversation as they do with any conversation through that channel).

Apart from just generally being awesome, there are many reasons that people choose to partner with a Andi, including (but not limited to) the following:

• There is something at stake (a challenge, stretch goal or opportunity), and it is urgent, compelling or exciting or all of the above;
• There is a gap in knowledge, skills, confidence, or resources;
• There is an aspiration or desire to accelerate results;
• There is a lack of clarity, and there are choices to be made;
• You are extremely successful, and success has started to become problematic;
• Work, family and health are out of balance; or
• You have not identified your core strengths and how best to leverage them.

Coaching has grown significantly for many reasons. Generally the world has changed a lot, and coaching is a useful tool to deal with many of those changes. Some of the real life factors include:

• Rapid changes in the external business environment;
• People are seeking a more holistic approach to life, and realise that success is more than just how much money you make, but also the impact you have on those you love and the broader community;
• Downsizing, restructuring, mergers and other organizational changes have radically altered what has been termed the “traditional employment contract”- companies can no longer achieve results using traditional management approaches;
• There is a widening disparity between what managers were trained to do and what their jobs now require them to do in order to meet increasing demands for competitive results;
• People are wrestling with fears around job insecurity and increased workplace pressures to perform at higher levels than ever before;
• Individuals who have experienced the excellent results of coaching are talking to more people about coaching. In short, coaching helps people focus on what matters most to them in life: business and personal. People today are more open to the idea of being in charge of their own lives. Coaching helps people do just that; so the industry continues to grow.

AnDi has been designed by coaches and psychologists to work independently, or with existing coaching services.

No, only your public profile. Messenger doesn’t require us to be “Facebook friends” to communicate on this channel.

Sorry about that, please watch this space we will be integrating different social media platforms over the coming months.

Whenever you like! Depending on the time and demand AnDi might be slower to respond. If you like you can also make appointments, which for some people helps keep them accountable and helps us prioritise resources.

Like all things new and digital, sometimes you just need to give them a poke. Feel free to ask AnDi what it is doing if it isn’t responding!

After purchase, you will be sent an email outlining the registration and onboarding process – this should only take a few minutes to complete. Once you are logged on just start chatting to AnDi in your preferred channel and AnDi will take it from there!

In short, no. AnDi will ask you the right questions to help you prioritise your goals and help create some guidelines, but will stop short of specific advice like this. Our mission is to help empower people to become better decision makers so you can be confident to make the choices that are right for you.

We believe that anyone who wants to do thing better tomorrow than they did today will benefit from coaching. Learning how to make good, values aligned decisions and clarify purpose and meaning is always beneficial. If you would like to do some prep work to help your first few conversations, you can always start by summarising what you would expect to accomplish in coaching, or how you would like to become better. When someone has a fairly clear idea of the desired outcome, AnDi can be a useful tool for developing a strategy for how to achieve that outcome with greater ease. If you don’t have that kind of clarity, don’t worry – AnDi can help you with that!

The length of any coaching partnership varies depending on the individual’s needs and preferences. Usually we find that people report immediate value, with certain types of focused coaching, seeing tangible results in 3 to 6 months. For the most part, people find it beneficial to work with AnDi for a longer period, allowing time for AnDi to learn more about you, and help you grow through all stages in your life.

AnDi’s role is to provide objective assessment and observations that foster an enhanced self-awareness and awareness of others, be a sounding board in support of possibility thinking and thoughtful planning and decision making, champion opportunities and potential, encourage stretch and challenge, commensurate with personal strengths and aspirations, foster the shifts in thinking that reveal fresh perspectives, challenge blind spots in order to illuminate new possibilities, and support the creation of alternative scenarios. Finally, the coach maintains professional boundaries in the coaching relationship, including confidentiality, and adheres to the coaching profession code of ethics.

The role of the individual or team is to co-create the coaching focus based on personally meaningful coaching goals, utilise assessment and observations to enhance self-awareness and awareness of others, envision personal success, assume full responsibility for personal decisions and actions, take courageous action in alignment with values, principles, personal goals and aspirations, and utilise the tools, concepts, models and principles provided by AnDi to engage effective forward actions.

To maximise your partnership with AnDi, try to:

• Focus-on one’s self, the tough questions, the hard truths–and one’s success.
• Observe-the behaviors and communications of others.
• Practice self discipline to challenge existing attitudes, beliefs and behaviors and to develop new ones which better align with your core values and serve your goals in a better way.
• Be decisive and learn quickly from mistakes – however uncomfortable, and in spite of personal insecurities, in order to reach for the extraordinary.
• Have grace and compassion for yourself, remember, while we empower you to make great decisions, life is like a box of chocolates – you never quite know what you’re going to get!
• Hold it lightly and have some humour – committing to not take one’s self so seriously, using humor to lighten and brighten any situation.
• Have courage to reach for more than before, to shift out of being fear based in to being in abundance as a core strategy for success, to engage in continual self examination, to overcome internal and external obstacles.

Yes we provide a 30 day money back guarantee. We stand behind our programming and the services we provide. If you are not completely satisfied with the coaching experience you may ask for a 100% refund. Email andi@decida.co to request your refund.