Life Coaching Explained

Published on 16 July, 2012 | Life Coaching & NLP

Life coaching defined and explained

What is coaching?

Coaching can be used for many purposes, ranging from career and performance coaching through to sports and life coaching.  Anything that a person wants to achieve can be enhanced and advanced with the assistance of a great coach. Coaching unlocks a person’s potential to maximise their performance and potential.

Traditional and conventional coaching tends to be specific in their approach. This means that the coach specialises in one profession or a single specialised area of expertise. Physical or sports coaches, for example, usually come from within their own professions. They have proved their success as professionally paid players or athletes.

In tennis, the foremost coaches of the top-ranking players have themselves been tennis professionals.  Similarly, football has also typically followed this pattern. In the major football clubs the coaches have come from the field of football, literally.

These, then, are examples of the traditional types of coach. They design the physical training programmes and coach their clients accordingly. They have expertise and experience in the skill required. Then they strive to advise and coach their protégés in this skill. These conventional coaches typically supply three quarters of the plan of action for their clients.

  During the 1980s the business coaches arrived in the guise of management or financial consultants. Their specialty is in the world of business and they spend their time establishing facts, preparing reports, designing new procedures and policies, and then helping the business client to implement the approved proposals.  These consultants contribute almost three quarters of the plan of action required in much the same way as sports coaches.

Could you be a Life Coach?

What does the life coach do?

The main role of the life coach is to enable and empower the client by using the client’s own commitment to succeed.  This premise relies on the social reinforcement of people conforming to who they say they are.

As humans we are conditioned to believe that when people do not fulfil their commitments they cannot be trusted.  They are seen as unreliable and devious, as liars and cheats.  It is the rare client who does not want their life coach to think they are any of these so they will do almost anything within their power to achieve the goals and targets that they have agreed upon with their coach.

A life coach facilitates a person’s learning so they can find new ways to think about and understand themselves and find a workable path to their goal.

Life coaches encourage people to learn new and more positive avenues to experience the obstacles preventing them reaching their goals, and find new ways to overcomes these obstacles.

Life coaches encourage their clients to believe that they have all the resources they need to solve their own problems, and it is the life coach’s job to help the client remove the obstacles that prevent them from doing so.

A life coach elicits answers from their client as they guide them through and towards self-discovery.  If, as a life coach you truly believe your client has all the resources necessary, then all the life coach has to do is assist the client to find the path best suited to them for successful results.

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