Abstract
People learn through different ways and means. One way is through seeking advice from one`s role models who are generally successful in their life. Life coaching essentially helps people to understand and think differently. Its main objective is to let the one undergoing coaching learn for himself what is good for his or her development. It helps learners develop brighter thinking. The coach does not tell the learners what they ought to do to achieve their dreams and ultimate goals in life. This is to avoid imparting his agenda on the learner. Life coaching appreciates the fact that every human being has unique desires. Life coaching career, therefore, puts in caution to ensure the learners do coaches do not decide life paths for their students. It is on this background that this work labours to define life coaching, provide a detailed account of how life coaching takes place, and clarifies the benefits of life coaching to people.
Definition of Life Coaching
Life coaching is the process and act of seeking professional assistance from an experienced and successful individual. A life coach is the professional whose work is to remind his or her client of his or her strengths and weaknesses. Clients are advised by life coaches have an in-depth understanding of him or herself. Through life coaching, one is able to appreciate and feel optimistic about him or herself. The life coach offers positive feedback about the client’s thoughts and behaviour and helps them to move forward in life. Life coaching concentrates on positive change. One appreciates wherever point he or she is at a particular moment. People who seek assistance from life coaches are able to comprehend their strengths weaknesses. Thereafter, they focus on positivity of where he or she aspires to be next.
Life coaching essentially helps people to understand and think differently. Its main objective is to let the one undergoing coaching appreciate and comprehend what is good for his or her development. It helps learners develop brighter thinking. The coach does not tell the learners what they ought to do to achieve their dreams and ultimate goals in life. This is to avoid imparting his agenda on the learner. Life coaching appreciates the fact that every human being has unique desires. Life coaching career, therefore, puts in caution to ensure the learners` coaches do not decide life paths for their students.
It is an emotional journey, and may have several challenges. It involves stretching the learner’s mind and soul as he or she has fun and learns. It leaves the learner solely responsible for the actions he or she through the struggle to attain their life`s objectives and goals. The learner gains rewarding insights. Through life coaching, learners develop self-awareness. Life coaching can also be defined as a process that enables learners to change limiting beliefs. Through coaching, people develop new, productive beliefs and behaviors that resonate with their newly created inspirations and ambitions. The learner becomes happy and hence fulfilling life ambitions becomes easy.
Life Coaching Process
The process of life coaching involves a unique relationship between the client and his or her coach. The first step to achieving a person’s ambitions in a life coaching process is to get familiar with what to expect. The client needs to understand that he or she will take focused actions to attain set targets. Talk is not cheap when it comes to life coaching. One pays to engage a professional to help him or her create a fuller, better and richer life than before. The real value of the trainee’s payment is not the conversation, but the actions he or she takes. The best ideas, intentions and innovations would be meaningless if people take no action. The only way to count on the value of conversations with the professional is taking dramatic actions towards the goals. Taking actions should not be random, but focused towards the goals one intends to achieve.
The next point one needs to remember is that he or she should capitalize on his or her strength. No one can produce extraordinary improvements if the only focus is to enhance and make better his or her weakness. As much as one would want to create a successful life by improving his weaknesses, he or she needs to comprehend that true greatness comes from strengths. It is from ones` strength that the best ideas and innovations come. Strength develops in people without exterior enhancements and endures. It is imperative to note that people develop a lot of focus and excitement when their actions are informed by their strengths rather than their weaknesses. Trainees become committed to developing their skills and realizing their objectives. The goals a trainee takes and the actions he or she makes should be leveraged on his or her strengths in a powerful way to inform their destiny. Furthermore, the trainee should remember to establish and accomplish stretch goals. Learners need trusted partners in their quest to attain their success. Having a trusted partner in the process of realizing individual goals spurs chances of triumph. One finds ease in setting and attaining stretch goals with support and accountability of a life coach. He or she gains the ability to achieve more than he could otherwise accomplish without the moral support of the life coach. This should be a constant reminder that the help of a life coach is not in vain.
Reaching one’s dreams is a challenging process. Having a life coach does not make the process easy. A trainee in life coaching class should be prepared to face the challenges of achieving objectives and goals in their life. Setting goals may be easy. Reaching them takes persistence and sheer hard work. A learner in life coaching class should be prepared, therefore, for push, pull and tests of the process.
Making better decisions after life coaching classes is an essential point to keep in mind. This is because the learner’s focus becomes clear. Everyone has a specific gift. What makes the difference between people is the level of focus. Those who seem more gifted than the rest focus more than their seemingly less gifted counterparts do. Life coaches help their clients become focused as they share ideas. The sole intention of the coach is to understand the client and completely endorse his or her goals and aspirations. At the same time, the life coach challenges the client to maintain focused and sharp thinking.
The last aspect of life couching one need to know before beginning life-coaching lessons is that the life coach is not an adviser. The coach does not perform the tasks of a parent, a sibling, a co-worker or a friend. The coach’s job is not to give the trainee advice. He or she only assists the learner to understand, explore and come up with the best choices for himself. The coach occasionally offers some pieces of advice though the learner should not expect too much of this. He gives the learner more valuable information than instructions.
Life coaching process involves 3 to 4 sessions every month. Studies have proved that this frequency of sessions accelerates the ability of the learner to build momentum towards achieving his foals. The frequency enhances one’s progress. Each session lasts 30 to 40 minutes. The length of time for each lesson is optimum to ensure that the learner focuses on the aspects that matter to his or her course. Life coaches may opt to conduct the sessions over the phone. In the event of special request from the client, the couches extend their expertise to the client’s homes or offices. This depends on the client’s schedule and occupation.
The initial engagement of a client and a life coach is three months. This is the minimum time required for any life coaching session. Surveys show that three months is the minimum time a person needs to gain clarity on him or herself. Three months gives one a clear picture of their life and the push to start accelerating towards his goals and dreams. Any extension of time past three months is subject to the client’s satisfaction. A client may decide to extend the life coaching sessions past the recommended three months to maintain the momentum they have acquired towards achieving their goals. Alternatively, one may opt to increase the length of time to deepen their personal explorations and self-evaluation. Either way, the decision solely relies on the learner.
The process of life coaching does not involve packaging solution to anyone’s challenges. The process is not a simple one, nor is it a war escapade. The life coach does not provide a one-size-fits-all prescription to all drawbacks facing clients. The coaches appreciate the fact that people derive happiness from different life aspects. For this reason, a life coach understands the path a client seeks. The ambitions and inspirations of each client are usually already structured within them. The coach enlivens the client’s awareness of the existence of the path.
In addition, the coach has the tools to help his or her clients overcome learned codes of behaviors that cause reluctance to changing one’s direction and moving forward. The behaviors that hinder people from realizing their destinies in life could be as simple as failing to comprehend one’s own potential. Additionally, conditional reflexes with intricate embodiment in one’s psyche could also lead to such failure. The process of life coaching involves enabling those undergoing training to understand their full potential. For those with dysfunctional psyche, life coaches help them overcome the conditioned reflexes. At the end of the training, the trainees get amazed at the things they can accomplish, but otherwise thought they could not do.
Benefits of Life Coaching
According to Dalai Lama, the ultimate purpose of every human being’s existence is happiness. Obtaining the happiness is the main benefit of life coaching. Happiness is a strange state. What makes one person happy may make another person extremely distraught. Happiness is unique to each person. More people are turning to life coaching to help them realize their true happiness than ever. The trend cuts across all ages and gender. It is fascinating that even the most successful people in the globe are not actually happy. Other people see them as having obtained their ultimate dreams and assume they are happy. The contrast is that they go seeking the real purpose of their lives from life coaches. Contrary to popular thoughts, life coaching is not a way of teaching populace to fix riches fast. More than financial success accrues to this crucial process of life transformation.
People often know that they are unhappy, but they do not know the cause of their unhappiness. People may know where it they desire to reach in their lives, but they do not know where to begin the transformation journey. These unclear circumstances cause obscurity and misery to several people around the world. The state brings darkness and turmoil to the mind. In the end, one loses focus in life if he or she does not get professional help to clear his or her intentions and give them a jumpstart. Life coaching benefits people in such situations by helping them set the goals they want to achieve. It distinguishes between what a person can do, what he or she should do, what one could do, what one really wants to do and what one ought to do. After this distinction, one creates an ideal goal. The ideal goal is what one truly wants and is able to take action towards achieving. A life coach works with one to create a systematic scheme. The plan is workable and dynamic, enabling one to achieve his goals and life objectives.
Forming the gap between a person’s current situations and the aspired future is the other benefit that accrues to life coaching. It helps an individual to change his or her course of action and orient it towards realizing their happiness. Doing the same thing over time always gets one the same results all the time. No matter how hard a person tries to reach certain goals using flawed procedures, they always fail. Life coaching enables one in such quandary to make the most crucial transformations of his or her actions and behaviour. It aids one in realizing what he or she needs to do differently to achieve better results than before.
Strategizing and development of techniques to help one achieve his dreams is the other benefit of life coaching. A life coach has several techniques and tools to draw out one’s way forward. One discovers more options that he or she thought were possible. Coaches use insightful and challenging line of questioning to help one decide which line is best for him or her. After deciding on one’s course of life, the life coach helps one to be glued towards achievement of the goals. In addition, the life coach helps the trained overcome obstacles associated with the realization of the dreams.
The most transforming benefit of life coaching is helping individuals overcome low confidence, obstacles and insecurities. Everyone has thoughts and opinions about their abilities. The thoughts and opinions about one’s ability runs in an individual’s mind all the time, a process psychologist call ‘self-stalking’. Self-stalk tells people of what they cannot do, why they cannot do it and the worst-case scenario in the event they tried. The thoughts are people’s limiting beliefs and hinder people from moving forward. People have such thoughts about themselves without any supporting evidence. Individuals build the thoughts from childhood, from the stories they hear in schools and adult lives. Most of them are inherited limits from families, friends and teachers. Life coaching helps individuals eradicate these limiting beliefs and remain focused to their ultimate life goals.
Conclusion
Concisely, life coaching brings clarity about what an individual wants. The trainee gets insights on how to get what he or she wants to achieve. It also bridges the gap between where an individual is at a particular moment and where he wants to be in the future. It is the bridge that takes someone close to his dreams. It lays out strategies and techniques to help an individual reach his goals faster than otherwise possible. The process of life coaching facilitates achievement of goals and life objectives. In addition, life coaching aids the trainee in overcoming life obstacles. The challenges that hinder an individual from realizing his full potential include low confidence and insecurities. After a life coaching session, a person overcomes these hindrances and becomes capable of reaching his aspirations. The life transforming process gives one’s chance to explore and evaluate all options available to develop his life. It also enables the trainee to dedicate time, support, motivation and encouragement to his cause.
References
Johnson, M. R. (2012). Personal Development in a Life Coach's Perspective. Sydney: Dansion
Ken, D. M. (2012). Effective Ways to Change your Life. New York: Apprentice Hall.
Kinston, K. S. (2011). Life Changing Tactics: Proper Life Coaching. Chicago: Renee & Sons.
