What is Life Coaching ?

Coaching is the latest ‘big thing’ for business and personal development.

Coaching is currently an 'unregulated' discipline in the UK and the title of ‘life coach’ can cover a multitude of practices. In the absence of any national standards for Coaching, the quality of life coach training and levels of personal effectiveness can vary considerably. It's important to understand that not all coaches and coaching courses are created equal, varying from 'academic style' degrees and diplomas to correspondence courses.

All of that aside, what is life coaching about?

Coaching is about you, your life goals and your awareness.

Specifically, coaching is a process that:

Promotes your awareness
Shows you where you are now
Guides you to identify what isn't working.
Helps you bring your life into balance
Increases your awareness of possibilities and choices
Guides you to identify where you want to go
Makes you aware of your sources of motivation

What is important to realise is that coaching is a very different frame from therapy. Coaching is generally goal-driven and about making gains in the future, while the therapeutic focus is on fixing patterns from the past.

Additionally, in life coaching the client will take on responsibilities as an active participant in the process of creating change - there will be specific things they will undertake on their own as part of the goal-seeking process and in moving towards their outcome.

The role of a coach is not to present advice or 'create the change', but to:

clarify your outcomes and goals
direct your awareness to relevant 'blind spots'
keep you honest with yourself and fully engaged in the process
keep you moving forward and on track

It’s vital that you have ownership of the gains you make through coaching, so a good life coach will proceed as a guide, drawing your awareness to areas where you can realise new possibilities and find solutions. This is why so many people find life coaching such an empowering process.

Coaches are valued as great sounding boards for our ideas, allowing us to expand on our hopes and dreams in an atmosphere of trust and encouragement.

By ‘thinking out loud’, we can also become aware of how we think about the world around us. Have you ever said something and then wondered to yourself how you could have put it that way? A good life coach will help you clarify your ideas too – sometimes asking “It sounds like you’re saying this… did you mean to?”

On another note, a lot of coaching is about asking good questions. You can direct awareness, engage motivation and highlight ‘blind spots’ through artful questioning.

For those interested in life coaching, I designed an 'awareness tool' as a way of getting people started on their own process. You can sign up for it here:

http://www.resourcefulchange.co.uk/coaching_tool.shtml

Could you benefit from coaching? I hope this has helped you to decide whether that is the next step for you.

Philip Callaghan is an NLP Trainer and Coach who has been working full time with private clients for several years. He is a Licensed Master Practitioner and Trainer of Neuro Linguistic Programming and a member of the International Association of Coaches.

Coming from a background in scientific research, Phil has used coaching principles to dramatically transform his own life and to set up and run a successful training and coaching consultancy.

Due to this transformation, he is now having more fun and greater success than he ever thought possible.