What is Life Coaching?

How little people know

I remember back to my days of being a civil engineer (longer ago than I care to mention) and the number of times I had people requesting me to fix their cars (or other such machines).

“But I haven’t the first clue about cars’ engines,” I would protest, only to be confronted with a quizzical look…

“But you’re an engineer, aren’t you?”

When you get really close to a subject it’s easy to forget how little other people know about something that you’ve learnt to take for granted.

I’m sure you know the feeling.

To be honest, it wasn’t THAT long ago that I first asked the question that so many others ask me regularly today:

“What is life coaching – and what does a life coach do?”

From my experience, people hold a lot of preconceived notions about life coaching, many of which are derived from disciplines that are more commonly known and understood, like psychology and counselling.

Unfortunately, rabbiting on about what a life coach is, often does little to dispel these notions.

I find it more useful, when introducing people to the unquestionable benefits of having a personal life coach, to start by explaining what life coaching is not … and then gently expand from there.

Life coaching is not counselling

First and foremost, life coaching is not a form of counselling or therapy.

Life Coaches aren’t there to diagnose how past traumas may have contributed to your current condition, help fix personal problems, heal emotional wounds or slay past demons.

A life coach will encourage you to appreciate that you are where you are ; that what’s happened in your past has happened and that your unique tapestry of life experiences, whether you reflect on these as good, bad or indifferent, has served merely to shape your current thinking, not to restrict it.

Unless it is of your choosing, where you go from here is not dictated to by where you are or where you have come from.

With a life coach you will come to appreciate that, every moment of every day, you are presented with choices.

You can continue on the path you are on – and in all likelihood get similar results to those you enjoyed had thus far – or you can choose a different path and, with the right approach and the right tools, get the results you truly desire … perhaps quite spectacular results!

A life coach will help you to realise that looking outwards for affirmations of your worth is simply an exercise in stroking the ego, whereas an appreciation of your true value is only achieved by looking within.

Life coaching is not consulting

Secondly, a life coach is not a consultant.

Consultants are people with expert skills, knowledge and resources about specialised areas of business. They are paid by businesses to apply their skills to solve business problems or increase business performance.

You might be tempted to think that life coaches are simply consultants who specialise in certain areas of life but this is far from the truth.

A life coach is not there to run your life, or areas of your life, for you. Neither is he or she there to show you how to run your life or even give you advice on how to run your life.

When it comes to your life there is only one true expert – you!

What a life coach will do is assist you to come to terms with your own magnificence and to liberate the untapped potential that lies dormant within you. In this way allowing you – the expert – to run your own life far more effectively and successfully in order to achieve your deepest desires.

Life coaches are far from perfect!

And, finally, life coaches are not – and certainly don’t need to be – shining examples of those who live the perfect life. Their role is to facilitate, not to model the way to achieve the life that their clients desire. That’s a very different thing requiring a very different skill.

Someone I know who had been persuaded to hire a life coach spent many months looking for the right person for the job – and eventually gave up.

Why? Because he was trying to find someone who didn’t exist – a coach displaying outward signs of living the kind of idyllic, utopian life that he dreamed of aspiring to.

“All these so-called coaches that I contacted seem like pretty regular people to me,” he complained.

But that’s the point.

Life coaches are, by and large, not glamorous celebrities, public icons or superheroes of some form! They are ‘regular people’ like you and me.

The difference is that life coaches have a true passion for helping others be the best they can be and – if they have come through a reputable training programme – they will be adequately equipped with the skills, tools and techniques to make that happen.

Life coaches are special people

Make no mistake though. Good life coaches are very special people!

They live and breathe the ups, downs, personal revelations, setbacks, achievements and breakthroughs of their clients. They offer a caring and supportive – yet challenging and inspiring – coaching environment, that encourages their clients to flourish and prosper.

Professional help without the stigma

It’s unfortunate – yet a  fact – that many people consider it a weakness to have to seek help from a professional person to help resolve their difficulties. Thus, some people may attach a stigma to the idea of receiving personal counselling or psycotherapy.

With life coaching you don’t need to have some kind of ‘problem’ before you approach a life coach and, in any case, life coaches don’t focus on fixing ‘problems’.

Life coaching works best with ‘whole’, ‘mentally well’ or ‘functioning’ clients.

Ideal clients are those who are forward looking; people who have a desire to live to their true potential, who want to go beyond the normal, break out of boring routines and experience a purposeful and exciting life; people who know that they are capable of so much more yet don’t know quite how to get there; people who want to live life by making an impact on the world rather than sitting back and allowing the world make its impact on them.

Small investment, Big returns

In the overall scheme of things an investment in life coaching is very small.

But the returns from that investment can be quite staggering!