What is Life Coaching?: Life coaching addresses a specific issue in your life, and a good life coach will work with you to find strategies to achieve your goals. You might go to a life coach when you need help with personal or professional projects or life transitions – for example, growing your business, changing your career, or finding success in your romantic life.
While life coaching is not therapy, it overlaps with therapy in some important ways. Both aim to help you find ways to live your life in a way that works for you. Coaches and therapists will support you in finding your own motivations, drives, desires and dreams, and explore realistic ways of manifesting them in your life. Some life coaches use Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) modality techniques to help reprogram your patterns of thought and behaviour.
How Does Life Coaching Work?: One important distinction to remember is that life coaching focuses on the present and the future, and usually will not delve into the past, your unconscious, or try to find the root cause of your issue. It is a highly practical and forward-thinking approach.
Life coaches help their clients in improving their relationships, careers, and day-to-day lives. A good life coach might be one that is successful in the way that you want to be successful. If you want to publish a book, for example, a coach who has published a book might be the one for you.
Conversely, if you want to work towards becoming more organised, a coach who doesn’t respond to your emails in a timely manner or struggles to schedule a session might not be right for you. Although there are many organisations that offer coaching training, it is an unregulated industry, so it is important to find someone that you trust.