What is it?
Life coaching is a professional service that can help people to identify the sorts of things that are holding them back. By focussing on the emotional challenges many of us face, transformational life coaching can turn people’s lives around. Only by uncovering some of the layers that many of us have with our beliefs, it becomes possible to understand those which are faulty and non-productive. Good life coaching addresses these layers and helps people to break away from outmoded or negative beliefs to find healthier ones.
As such, life coaching is often seen as an alternative to talking therapies but it can also work in tandem with psychological approaches to making improvements in your life. As a life coach, I am focussed on the individual needs of all my clients. By providing a supportive environment that makes clients feel safe, I can help individuals to identify what they want to achieve as well as problems that may be stopping them. Like all good life coaches, I continue to offer support over time, whether this is face-to-face, over the phone or by using other modern communication technologies. In short, you can think of life coaching as a combination of friendliness and mentoring that is akin to counselling or therapy but which is a distinct process from either of them.
Who uses a life coach?
Lots of people use life coaches to help them get where they want to be. This includes professional people who might want to get more out of their career. There again, it could be family-focussed people who want to work out how they can improve their relationships with those around them. Young and old people can benefit from transformational life coaching. Outwardly successfully people and those who have suffered traumatic experiences in younger life that feel like they have always been held back will also call upon the services of a life coach. If you provide therapies to clients and think someone you are dealing with could benefit from life coaching or you have more questions to ask about your own situation, then please feel free to contact me.
Therapy versus life coaching
As mentioned elsewhere on my site, some people turn to life coaching as an alternative to counselling or talking therapies – such as CBT, for example – because the service offered can often provide favourable results. That said, you do not necessarily need to set one sort of service up against another. They can blend together and provide a truly transformative way forward. Of course, a forward-thinking approach is at the heart of life coaching since it examines the present closely in order to make a big difference to the future. By contrast, talking therapies tend to be focussed solely on past events to work out why something is happening now. If you have tried other types of therapy and not got enough out of them, then try life coaching because many, many people report just how helpful they find it for their future lives.
Am I the right coach for you?
I don’t suit everyone. My approach is supportive and designed to bring out the real truth. However, this does mean that sometimes the journey will touch on sometimes difficult issues. Matters like narcissistic abuse, for example, which is one of my specialisms, can be very tender. However, they need to be faced up to to make progress. My approach is to deal with such difficult issues sensitively but with honesty.