What is Life Coaching
and How Can It Help?

What is life coaching?

In a nutshell, it is working with someone who can help you recognize, uncover, and develop the amazing human potential you possess. Just like an athlete needs someone to guide, encourage, motivate, and champion them to achieve their full potential, in our lives we frequently fail to be the best we can be by trying to pull ourselves up by our own boot-straps.

We often need a positive, unbiased, and experienced person to help us figure out how to get from where we are in our lives to where we want to be. Sometimes we also need help in figuring out where it is that we actually do want to be. “Not here,” is not the answer that is going to set you on a path to happiness and fulfillment. If we only know where we don’t want to be, the best that we can hope to achieve is to be running from that place without a destination in mind. This is a sure recipe for feeling lost and adrift.

What is life coaching able to offer me if I am feeling unsure of my direction?

To know what we want is the first, most important, and often most difficult step to actually achieving these things. Helping you to figure out what you truly want is an important function of life coaching. Finding the answers in life is, in large part, about asking the right questions. Sometimes we don’t know what these questions are, and sometimes we are just afraid to ask them. Life coaching can provide support and guidance in finding the questions that need to be asked, and the courage and clarity to answer them.

I know where I want to go, so what is life coaching going to do to help me get there?

Once you are clear about what you want to achieve in your life, you need to start taking steps towards achieving it. Figuring out what steps to take can also be challenging, and deciding where to start can often keep people feeling trapped and paralyzed. Life coaching helps you to map out the steps needed to get you headed in the direction that you want to go. It also helps you to prioritize and to understand and remember that every journey begins with a single step, and that just one step at a time is the way to even the highest peak.

Staying motivated is another area where life coaching can be vital. There are a few very rare individuals able to single-mindedly stay on course through sheer self-determination, but most of us need frequent encouragement. Regular life coaching sessions can help you to stay focused, on-course, and to believe that you have what it takes. Encouragement is like vitamins, we can’t take a mega-dose and hope that it will last; we need repeated doses to keep us functioning fully. Life coaching can be like having a personal trainer. Rather than urging you to “come on, give me ten more push-ups,” a life coach will encourage you to send out one more resume!

What is holding me back from achieving what I know I want? What is life coaching able to achieve in terms of overcoming obstacles?

A key area that life coaching can help with is overcoming negative thought patterns, limiting beliefs, and ways of thinking that may be holding you back. The use of guided and personalized affirmations and visualization techniques can be very effective in overcoming attitudes and thoughts that can keep you from living your best life.

Other people’s negativity can also be a great barrier to our fulfillment. Life coaching can provide the positive backup to help overcome the unsupportive feedback and input that we often receive from people in our lives. It is important to understand that all negativity is based on fear. People may fear that your success means they will lose their importance in your life, or that they will be compared unfavorably with you. There are many different fears that can contribute to people displaying negativity, but it is vital to learn how to filter and counteract this, and not to allow it to drag us down.

In conclusion, we could answer the question of ‘what is life coaching?’ by saying that, ideally, life coaching is whatever you need it to be. Just like there are as many ways to choose a path in life as there are people doing the choosing, there are as many ways to benefit from life coaching as there are people coaching and being coached.

Back to Choosing Life Coaching Online from What Is Life Coaching

Go to Choosing Life My Way Home Page from What Is Life Coaching