What is Life Coaching?
At Mind Space Counselling we define life coaching as a synergistic relationship between a trained professional/life coach and a person needing help to tap into their full potential. Similar to professional athletes who need the support, objective perspectives and insights from a detached athletics coach, so does a CEO, entrepreneur, executive, professional or business leader needs a individual coaching to excel and take their businesses, careers and lives to the next level.
What is a Life Coach?
A life coach is an expert trained in guiding and helping persons make, clarify, meet and exceed professional and personal goals. The coach helps their clients harness their strengths using intuition and psychological principles so that they can be empowered to face and overcome all manner of challenges without burning out. The coach’s work is not to indoctrinate, offer instruction, judgment or opinions. All they do is to provide an empowering and objective environment, where the client can tap into their potential and achieve their loftiest goals.
How is Life Coaching Different from Therapy or Consulting?
Consulting – There are aspects of life coaching that can be considered consulting. However, consulting is more about subject matter expertise and information about an industry. Comparing the two, coaching is all about insights from a life expert who gives advice on all areas of personal and business life, unlike a consultant who may be an expert on aspects such as a given business process. Moreover, unlike consultants who leave as soon as they have provided their advice, the life coach stays to ensure you have implemented the new skills, have made the changes and are working towards your goals.
Therapy – Coaching does not work with past traumas or unresolved issues since your life coach is not a psychotherapist or psychologist. Life coaching focuses on the present and goals moving forward. In fact, life coaches work with successful healthy people looking to improve their outcomes. If you have unresolved issues from the past, a life coach is more likely to refer you to a therapist.
Areas that Life Coaching can Work in
The areas in life where a coach can help you are virtually limitless, especially considering that Mind Space Counselling coaches work in so many verticals. The following are some of the areas that we work in:
- Setting and achieving objectives and goals
- Planning your life, career, and business
- Overcoming your fears and blocks
- Attaining financial independence and security
- Balancing personal and business life
- Prioritizing and removing clutter from your life
- Enhancing productivity and banishing procrastination
- Finding your purpose and staying motivated
- Building better relationships
- Becoming a better communicator
Among many others…
How Life Coaching Works
Coaches will use different processes, methods, and techniques to help you attain your professional and personal goals. As such, you may find that different coaches follow different manuals, though the end goal is to help you succeed.
Nonetheless, Mind Space Counselling life coaching follows the following outline:
- First Meeting – We will set up a meeting with your life coach that will typically be anything from 15 minutes to an hour. This is a touching base session, where you get to know whether the coach is right or your needs. For the coach, this is the discovery stage where they get to know your goals. The coach will ask a lot of questions to try to find the best way to help you moving forward.
- Techniques and Processes – The common techniques and processes to expect include emotional freedom techniques, relaxation, meditation, neuro-linguistic programming, hypnosis, affirmations and visualizations among many others.
- The Coaching Sessions – Coaching sessions are dynamic and will vary from coach to coach. Moreover, the coach will change their techniques and approaches depending on your strengths and weaknesses and level of development. For the most part, the sessions will be about the coach helping you look at your goals from a different perspective.
- The Outcomes – What you get from your life coaching sessions will depend on your purpose and direction. You go to a life coach because you are feeling frustrated and lost and it is the work of the coach to make you feel directed mobilized and reenergized. The coach’s job in the sessions is to ensure that you are taking action, are being accountable and are following through on what you say you are going to do. If you do what the coach instructs, over time you should experience clarity of vision, happiness, and validation particularly when you start achieving your goals.
- The Coaching Relationship – While the coach may be many things including a facilitator, friend, advocate, and consultant, their ultimate job is to challenge you to be better. The coach is not there to always cheer you on or to spoon feed you, rather they are there to hold you accountable for what you have committed yourself to do.
Who Will Benefit
Persons who will benefit from our life coaching are high achieving persons that need more from either their professional or personal lives or both. Professionals such as CEOs and business owners may hire a coach to keep them accountable for their goals of success, efficiency or productivity. People that may also benefit in their personal lives include stay-at-home mums, students, and freelancers among many others, that may just need the push from a life coach to reach greater heights in their lives.
Benefits of Life Coaching
- Versatility – Our coaches do specialize but most are trained to help you to reach your goals in many areas of your life. They use techniques and methods that work for different purposes in all manner of situations.
- Focus & Direction – Life coaching helps set you on the right path as a coach helps you reevaluate your goals, and enhances your focus toward achievement.
- Improved Productivity – Life coaching has been shown to be effective at improving work performance by as much as 70% in some instances. This is because it enhances aspects such as time management, team effectiveness, work/life balance, communication skills and confidence that results in better motivation at the workplace.
- Efficiency – A coach provides direction and challenges you to be more accountable and gives you more clarity. This helps you achieve their goals faster than if you tried to do it on your own.
- It Works – Life coaching has been shown to be effective at enhancing performance and reporting high levels of satisfaction. More than 86 percent of companies assert that they made back the money invested in professional and life coaches. 99 percent of individuals and companies also asserted that they were satisfied with the process.
The Process
Life coaching takes a structured format of your coach working with you to come up with custom supportive practices.
We help you define your vision: This will include your drives for wanting to achieve your goal
The coach helps the coachee set achievable yet challenging goals that are aligned with their long term core values and drives
The coach will review the course of action and the resources available to you before making a plan of action. These will include steps to take, potential obstacles and how to deal with them.
Work with the coach to identify any limiting beliefs and barriers that hold you back and how you can get past these to achieve your goals.
The coach will assess where you are at present and then track your progress by analysing how you deal with obstacles, while helping you stay motivated and committed.