A lot of people ask me “What is a Life Coach?”, so let’s take a look here. Essentially a Life Coach is a coaching professional who gives you practical help to quickly achieve better life outcomes and increase your satisfaction in life.
What does a life coach do?
Life coaches work like any other kind of coach, helping you take your performance to the next level. A life coach works from the belief that you are perfect, capable and potent; that you can and will achieve positive change with guidance. A life coach partners with you in finding ways to achieve your personal or professional life goals, in areas such as relationships, work, career, finances, starting a business, entrepreneurship, work/life balance, communication, social skills, emotional balance, wellbeing, weight management and addictive or counter-productive behaviours.
How does life coaching work?
A life coach specialises in helping you achieve better outcomes and life satisfaction by operating at a higher level.
Life coaching is a process of realising potential by:
- maximising the positive thoughts, actions and behaviours that bring you success
- minimising the self-limiting thoughts, actions and behaviours that hold you back
It’s future focused and does not spend time analysing the past, as many forms of therapy do, rather looking to what can be done right now to improve performance and outcomes. As humans when we are future focused and goal focused – seeking solutions – we re-train our brains to expect that our goals can be reached.
What qualifications do life coaches have?
I am trained by the hugely successful life coach and trainer Brooke Castillo, whose work you can see here. I have completed in-person life coach training directly with Brooke and completed exams and practical assessments to achieve life coaching certification. I have been working with clients since 2015 and sharing their success. The life coaching industry is not regulated, so my responsibility as a life coach includes maintaining my own standards of ethics, ongoing training, professionalism and care. I believe in life coaching wholeheartedly and Brooke’s huge body of work and rapidly growing multi-million-dollar The Life Coach School speak for themselves.
Life coaching and therapy
A life coach helps you access a radically different perspective on your problems, possibilities and potential and will gently guide you inwards to look for your own solutions. It frees up energy so you can move forward in ways you may not have seen for yourself. One of the great things about life coaching is that results can come very quickly, often in days or weeks rather than the longer term results many people expect with therapy.
Let me just add that I’m not against therapy at all. It can be extremely beneficial for mental illness such as depression, anxiety… etc. Therapy works on a different basis to coaching – it is diagnostic, treats mental illness and often involves examining one’s past and bringing unconscious drivers and influences to the surface, to allow them to be released. It can also model new thoughts and behaviours. Therapy may well be indicated for those experiencing unexamined trauma and issues from the past, although often coaching can work very successfully after or alongside therapy. If you feel you would benefit from therapy, please speak with your health professional.
Who is life coaching for?
I believe that life coaching works best with people who are already functioning very effectively but are still not happy in their lives. Is this you? Do you still have a level of suffering you can’t accept? To be successfully coached you’ve probably already worked on your own mental health, personal development or wellbeing at some point. You may have tried a bunch of therapies but nothing really stuck. You are willing to accept responsibility for your situation and ready to take action to improve it. Provided you do not have unacknowledged mental illness that may need treatment by therapy first, you are likely to respond very well to the methods used in Life Coaching.
How can life coaching help me?
Life Coaching does not dwell on the difficulties of the past and ask why. You are simply guided to accept the world as it is, yourself as you are. This creates space to look at the solutions available to you right now to improve your situation, reach your goals and find more satisfaction in life. In this modern world of over-stimulation and disconnection, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed and lose your sense of place. Are you ready to take control of your mind and make conscious choices about the way you want to live?
Feature image credit: Pixabay
