What is Life Coaching?
Life Coaching is focused on clarifying goals, increasing motivation and ability to change, challenging limiting beliefs and motivating someone to take the action required to get the life she or he wants. Often the need for life coaching comes from someone reaching the realisation that “I’m stuck! Enough is enough. I don’t want to go on like this anymore ”
Life coaching provides the means to step back, take stock, decide what to do and how to do it, take action and do it well, then sustain and build on the changes. It can be either:
- narrow in focus – perhaps someone wants to change job or start a new business. OR
- wide ranging – perhaps someone recognises they need to stop just existing and start living the life they want.
One thing for sure is that if someone reaches a ‘tipping point’ for personal change but also knows clearly what to change and has the skill, mindset and commitment to make the changes required on their own, then they would not need a life coach!
How can life coaching help?
People come to me for help when they know there must be more to life but may not be exactly sure what that is and what they need to do. Someone may have concerns in one or more of the following areas:
- Relationships – this can range from finding a soul mate, a fear of commitment, dealing with a painful break up and moving on, the quality of relationships with friends, family, work peers and bosses…
- Career – finding a job you love doing, perhaps changing career, developing skills, or setting up your own business …
- Health – physical, emotional and mental well being (and for some, spiritual health too), making lifestyle changes, making commitments and sticking to these…
- Work-life balance – usually too much work (or unfulfilling work) and not enough life; perhaps feeling severe stress and facing burn-out…
- Confidence – insecurity; low self belief; unable to make tough decisions; not dealing with difficult situations (and people); low trust in others…
- Self – changing limiting beliefs and habits, preventing self sabotage, self esteem, relaxation…
- Wealth – attitudes to moneysetting and achieving financial goals, finding new sources of income or ways to reduce outgoings (note: I am not an independent financial adviser and I never give recommendations for investments etc)
My job as a life coach is to help the person to work out what s/he wants, when they want it and how to get there. Actions are agreed, commitments are made and kept. My role is to stretch thinking and enable the person to confront things constructively including those things they may not like to deal with but really need to tackle in order to progress.
Part of the process involves identifying and addressing obstacles to change including unhelpful beliefs and habits – for examples see Life Coaching – 9 Common Barriers To Change
Life coaching is not a soft touch and should not to be entered into lightly. However, even though it is challenging at times, as a “critical friend” I also support the change process, regularly reviewing progress, helping to recognise and celebrate success and addressing whatever needs to be addressed together along the way.
Why should you choose me as your life coach?
I have been coaching people successfully for over 30 years as part of my work as a business consultant and management trainer. Most of this involved coaching leaders to change and learn how to lead their people more effectively. I trained as a life coach in 2001, not just to add another string to my bow but to further develop a ‘whole person, whole life’ approach to my coaching work.
As I am also a qualified, experienced Hypnotherapist and Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) practitioner, I offer something that other coach’s cannot, and that is the ability to help someone change how they think, feel and act in ways that are useful to them. However, I only use hypnotherapy and NLP techniques as and when appropriate, and then only with the agreement of the client.
I am not a ‘paint by numbers’ coach and adapt my approach to best meet my client’s needs.
Last but not least, as a life coach I care about and enjoy helping people to get the life they want.
