What is a Life Coach?
Have you ever heard of a top athlete without a top coach?
Probably not. As Bill Gates once said:
“Everyone needs a coach. We all need people who give us feedback. That is how we improve.”
A life coach can have the same effect on your potential. They help you reach successes you might not have been able to envision for yourself. In any aspect of your life.
But what is a life coach? And why would you want to work with one?
For starters, a life coach is not a consultant, mentor or therapist. They use different tools and approaches. What a life coach does is help you to change. They give you the confidence to move forward and to improve the areas of your life that you are unhappy with.
How can a coach help me?
During coaching, you will learn to break down the barriers that so far prevented you from change. Your coach creates an environment where positive action can take place.
Using in-depth questions and other tools, your coach helps you discover your needs, wishes, and passions you might have forgotten about. Questions like these:
- What is going on in your life right now?
- What are the problems and challenges you are facing?
With these techniques, your coach wants to empower you to find the answers in yourself. You are the expert of your own life. You have the responses to the challenges you are faced with; they are just hidden or concealed under years of learned behaviors and distorted beliefs. If needed a life coach will also call you out on your misconceptions. Life coaching is about guiding, supporting and helping you in unwrapping them.
The experience will help you to make choices that create a healthy, balanced, productive and meaningful life. You will feel confident in your goal, will be focused on them and know how to get there. A coach helps you with staying accountable for these changes.
With a life coach, you will get from “where you are now” to “where you want to be.”
What is a coaching session like?
Generally, most coaches offer a free introduction session or chemistry meeting which can go from 15 to 60 minutes. During this meeting, you will get to know each other, find out which goals the client wants to achieve and how to get there. You then agree on the further steps to take. Usually, you meet with your coach for 60–90 minute sessions for a fixed time-frame which can be anything from three sessions to six months.
The sessions itself are usually one-on-one. They can be in person, via phone or in a video call. Apart from traditional one on one coaching, life coaches also offer talks, workshops, video courses or write books on their expert subject.
Who works with a life coach?
Anyone can work with a life coach. Most life coaches have a focus on a particular subject or niche (confidence, love relationships, career change or self-care). Depending on what you need help with, it also makes sense to check what the expertise of a coach is and if it fits what you are looking for.
How is coaching different from therapy?
Therapy is for healing and becoming mentally healthy. Coaching, on the other hand, is about thriving, reaching goals and breaking through patterns. While therapy looks mostly at the past and how your suffering has affected you, life coaching tries to give you a foundation to grow.
Also, the approaches are different. While a therapist will not share their personal story to give you a projection surface, a coach can share their struggles with you to help you connect easier and gain perspective.
How do I know that a coach is right for me?
Finding a good coach can be overwhelming. Theoretically, everyone can call themselves a life coach. There are a lot of different forms of training and certificates which can be confusing if you look for a coach. The “gold standard” for coaching is an accredited training from the International Coach Federation (ICF).
