Transformational Life Coaching: The Real Deal

Reinventing the wheel

How do you stand out in a crowded market?

By wearing glitzy colours and shouting “Look at me, I’m different”.

Despite still being in the early stages of the ‘life coaching product life cycle’ we are already witnessing attempts by training providers to create niche markets by promoting ‘reinventions of the wheel.’

‘NLP’ coaching

Neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, is an approach to personal development that emanated from university studies in California in the 1970s. That research centred on identifying why certain psychotherapists were more effective communicators and more successful at helping people to change, than others.

Today, NLP is just one of many tools and techniques that may be employed by professional life coaches worth their salt. For example, NLP has been shown to be useful in helping build good rapport with clients.

Although NLP is one of the many strings in the life coach’s bow, astute marketers have wasted no time in trying to position it as a premium form of life coaching.

The term ‘NLP life coach’ (Neuro-linguistic programming life coach clearly didn’t have the right ring) was coined in an effort to promote the erroneous idea that life coaching is subsidiary to NLP, and not the other way around.

‘Neuroscience coaching’

It seems there’s something about the term “neuro” (meaning related to the nervous system) that captures public attention. Perhaps it is the obvious association with “neurosurgeon”, a highly skilled and well-respected type of medical practitioner?

“Neuroscience coaches” represents one of the more recent attempts to apply niche marketing to life coaching. No doubt the idea is to appeal to those who are more academically inclined, or who aspire to an academic-sounding title!

‘Positive Psychology’

One of the latest attempts at rebranding life coaching, and one that I personally find quite amusing, is “Positive Psychology”.

Psychologists have long viewed the field of human behaviour and motivation to be their territory and, in fairness, they have to submit to fairly long and intense periods of academic study to obtain their qualifications.

Life coaching, unlike psychology, is an unregulated profession. The upshot of this, sadly, is that not every person who calls him or herself a ‘life coach’ has been exposed to the type of high-quality training that does the field the justice it truly deserves.

Many psychologists are justifiably perturbed by this. But, at the same time, they are only too aware of how relatively powerful, practical, and hands-on life coaching can be if practised by well-trained, ethical coaches.

It seems the solution to this dilemma lay in establishing a new ’branch’ of psychology that could be promoted as an effective replacement for this upstart called life coaching.

Those readers involved in ‘positive psychology’ will need to forgive me, but I can’t help thinking that whoever came up with the new name shot themselves (or their fellow psychologists) in the foot.

By implication, it seems reasonable to assume that those psychology practices that do not fall under the new banner of so-called ‘positive psychology’ are, in effect ‘negative psychology’, whatever that might mean.

Then again, perhaps the person who came up with the idea of positive psychology is not a psychologist at all … but an astute marketer intent on promoting life coaching by rebranding it as the ‘lighter side’ of psychology?

Personal transformation

Life coaching, at its heart, involves personal transformation.

At its most effective, it harnesses a carefully designed process that involves substantial growth in self-awareness and embracing internal change.

This process can take several months.

‘New way’ life coaching

Some astute marketers, seeing the burgeoning field of life coaching as a source of commercial gain, have exploited this by reinventing life coaching as a miracle problem-solution quick-fix.

Their adverts proudly proclaim how the ‘new way’ allows clients to achieve in minutes, what would have taken months ‘the old life coaching way’.

What these adverts conveniently fail to mention is that most clients arrive for life coaching having spent a great many years developing habits that cannot simply be brushed away with a magic wand.

This includes the gradual internalisation of limiting beliefs, prioritisation of day-to-day needs over values, and abrogation of personal responsibility for the choices made and the outcomes that result.

Life coaching is life coaching

No doubt, in the future, there will be more and more attempts to make commercial capital from life coaching through rebranding, renaming, reinventing and repositioning life coaching.

However, no matter how shiny the suit that it may be dressed up in to impress, life coaching remains life coaching.

No smoke and mirrors

At New Insights, we’re primarily driven by a passion for people, not commercial gain, so we like to steer clear of marketing smoke and mirrors.

We offer an in-depth, internationally accredited certification programme that leaves absolutely nothing out in its quest to impart the awareness, knowledge, skills, tools and techniques required to become a top-flight life coach.

After all, this amazing field of life coaching deserves nothing less than practitioners who are professional, ethical, committed and passionate about their business …

… Transforming lives for the better!