We live in a world where many of us face challenges, both big and small, every day. From setting achievable goals to navigating emotional upheaval to finding meaningful work and purpose, sometimes we could all use a little help. Enter life coaching: a holistic approach to personal growth that focuses on empowering individuals with the tools needed to make positive changes in their lives. But what exactly is life coaching? And how can it help you achieve your goals?
In this short article, we’ll explore what life coaching is and isn’t, and how you can expect to benefit from engaging in one-on-one work with a coach. Many people throughout the world still view life coaching as a mysterious and potentially pointless profession. Why would people pay someone to help them decide what’s important to them and figure things out – isn’t that what living life is all about?
What is life coaching? Exactly!
Whilst you can get support from friends and family, life coaches offer an elevated kind of help. Whether they’re a sports coach, leadership or team coach, life coach, or career coach, coaches unlock people’s potential to maximise their performance by helping them learn rather than teaching or telling them.
Whilst your mother may advise you on how to raise a child, or your friend may tell you how to become more financially stable, coaches help people learn to set and achieve goals in a proactive way that is conducive to their ongoing personal growth and development.
Life coaches don’t instruct people on what and how to do things; they seek out ways to understand the coachee they’re working with and help them design a congruent path to success that aligns with their needs, circumstances and strengths.
Over the past few decades, life coaching has become a popular methodology that many people use for fast-tracking their learning, personal growth, and ongoing development. However, people who work with a life coach aren’t guaranteed results. Results come solely from within when people recognise their self-worth and start believing in their ability to facilitate positive changes in their own lives.
Though there are many coaching models, this handbook will emphasise the life coach’s role as a facilitator of learning instead of an expert of life in general. There is a vast difference between teaching people and assisting people in their process of learning and self-improvement. Essentially, coaching is about helping people to make wise decisions that align with their priorities and ultimately improve their day-to-day performance. This is important to note, because there are no experts on life. So let us first define what life coaching isn’t;
Life coaches do not give advice.
Most people assume that life coaches offer ‘life advice’ in the same way that many other forms of professional do. For instance, if you hire a lawyer, you’ll get legal advice. If you hire a financier, you’ll get financial advice. But life coaches aren’t advisors, nor should they ever be — they are simply facilitators of personal growth.
Life coaches do not teach or lecture.
We cannot learn about life in a classroom or by reading a book, and it is not the job of a life coach to teach someone how to live. If asked, life coaches may offer insight and make suggestions to a coachee, but the focus of life coaching is to help people learn from their own life experiences (and from their mistakes) rather than from your’s.
Life coaches are not business consultants.
Business and career coaches are different from life coaches. While life coaches might indirectly help people improve their professional performance (such as gaining in confidence, setting boundaries or improving their work-life balance), the role of a life coach is to help people make the attitude adjustments and behavioural changes necessary for setting and pursuing meaningful goals that inspire them.
Life coaches are not therapists.
Despite its many benefits, some therapists practice under the premise that people need healing from their pasts. This within itself undermines the human capacity to mature and learn from the past. A life coach’s aim should never be to ‘fix’ ill people or heal their problems. Instead, life coaches are disciplined in the sense that they focus only on the future, unless they are translating peoples past experiences into ‘lessons learned’ that can aid progression and productivity in any given goal setting process.
Now, let us define what it is.
Life coaching is not all that different from sports coaching. A sports coach will help an individual or group to identify a specific goal and then create a plan to achieve it. And the same may be said for life coaching.
A life coach’s objective is to help a person (or group) achieve a specific goal. They will analyze how far away the individual is from their target and then create a plan on how to close that gap. This might seem simplistic, but in essence, this is all that life coaching needs to be. And as with all areas of expertise, the more insight and knowledge you have about something, the better you’ll be at practically applying it.
In this article, we have drawn inspiration from the “Ultimate Life Coaching Handbook” by renowned coach and personal development expert, Kain Ramsay. His understanding of human behavior and passion for empowering others have led to the formulation of essential principles that transform lives.
