The Many Benefits Life Coaching Can Bring For You
Do you sometimes feel your progress through life has stalled, and that you're not achieving the happiness and success you should? If the answer is yes, you're far from alone.
Modern life is filled with stressful barriers that stop people reaching their full potential. But there's a proven way of unlocking your life and getting it back on track. It's called life coaching, and its popularity is growing fast.
What is Life Coaching?
Life coaching is an approach to realizing your full range of capabilities, and so increasing your contentment and well-being. It can be used to address personal matters or advance your career, whichever side of your life you feel could use a helping hand.
It's done by working with a professional coach, who will help you in four main ways.
- Analyzing your current situation to uncover the obstacles which are keeping you unhappy or unfulfilled.
- Deciding on goals you can work towards to overcome these obstacles.
- Drawing up realistic and achievable plans to help you get where you want to go.
- Providing support and encouragement along the way toward your targets.
What Life Coaching Isn't
It's important to realize that life coaching isn't the same thing as therapy. Rather than looking to your past to provide answers, coaching is firmly fixed on the future and how you can improve your life going forward.
Life coaching is also very different to personal or professional consulting. Life coaches aren't experts in every subject who can provide instant solutions to any conceivable problem.
Instead, they teach you how to develop your own solutions. They help you to break free from thought patterns, beliefs, and habits which limit you and deny your potential. They do this by shining a fresh light on your situation, using their neutral status as outside observers of your life.
And lastly, life coaching isn't about preaching or bossing you around. It's a creative partnership that succeeds best by working together. However, a good life coach will challenge your assumptions and preconceptions by asking difficult questions, and this isn't always an easy experience.
The Benefits Life Coaching Brings
Although life coaching is based on a straightforward and easily understood idea, it can bring about impressive and profound improvements in your life.
Better Self Care - A life coach can help you find space for self care, creating time for yourself no matter how busy and stressful your life is at the moment.
Build Emotional Balance and Well-Being - By bringing your reality and expectations into better balance, coaching will also improve your emotional well-being. You'll feel less frustration and gain greater emotional poise.
Finding Your Direction - Although you probably recognize that you need to make changes in your life, you may be unsure exactly which way you need to go. Life coaching helps you find your best direction, providing a workable path toward reaching the goals you've set for yourself.
Discovery of Your Inner Self - Achieving these goals will help you discover what you're really capable of. This increases your self-confidence and helps overcome nagging feelings of self-doubt.
Why Use a Coach?
In theory, there's nothing here that you couldn't do on your own. But just as an athlete needs a trainer to get the most out of their talent, everyone can use a little help to fulfill their innate promise.
And so while a life coach can't magically fix all your problems, they can help you find the inner resources to release your own potential, increase your fulfillment, and build a happier and more successful life for yourself.
Jocelyn Farrar
LifePath Counseling and Coaching