Life Coaching – What is it and how can it help improve your life?

Many successful people have come to realize that working harder and longer, and being overwhelmed by daily tasks, doesn’t leave much time for living their lives in a purposeful way. A Professional Life Coach can help you identify and uncover what keeps you from living your full potential. It is a one-on-one relationship that provides a supportive and non-judgmental space to help you begin creating a life you desire.

Identifying and effecting the changes that can bring about a balanced and satisfying life are not easy. You will be challenged to make your life more meaningful by determining what you really want out of life, thus begin the identification and creation of your individual life goals. A Life Coach can help you strategize and acquire the tools you need to achieve your life goals. My approach includes steps to help you identify and reframe the thoughts and attitudes that get in your way. I can help you break negative patterns and take action to achieve your maximum potential.

A Life Coach may be helpful if you find yourself agreeing with some of the following statements:

• Are you feeling stuck or trapped in a particular area of your life (e.g., career, relationships, finances, health and well-being)?
• Do you regularly make rationalizations for staying in situations you know make you miserable?
• Are you going through the daily motions, wandering aimlessly or waiting for something better to happen, something better to come along…but it never does?
• Do you feel you’ve gradually gone off course, have lost direction in life and are questioning how you ended up where you are now?
• Are you trying to figure out which life direction to go or what your life direction is?
• Do you have an idea of what you’d like your life to look like, have goals in a certain area(s) of your life, but don’t know how to get there?
• Do you want to work toward creating a more fulfilled, purpose driven life?

If you answer “Yes” to some of the questions above, consider asking yourself this:

• Do I have a map, a compass, a guide to help me find my path and keep me on track? What’s my life strategy?

If you don’t have a guide, the good news is that you don’t have to be alone on your journey toward creating a more fulfilled life. Coaching strategies can provide that map to help get you from where you are now to where you want to be. A coach can help you get unstuck and tap into what you really want then make a plan for how to get there. Many coaches simply focus on goal setting and addressing external barriers but goals can be hard to realize if one’s internal barriers are not addressed. Internal barriers are often the biggest obstacles that stand in our way. I can help you tackle those internal obstacles, the fears and self-doubts, and dissolve the limiting beliefs that keep you “playing small” and remaining stuck in old patterns that limit your life satisfaction. Nabler and Hibino (1998) describe this process well:

“Otherwise intelligent people take the same self-limiting thinking approaches every time without realizing they are stuck in time-worn ruts on the road to mediocrity.”

Improve your level of awareness, personal responsibility and ability to make value driven choices guided by a foundation of structure, non-judgmental support and feedback. Redesigning your life will require development of new habits of thinking and behaving. We will work in alliance to elicit self-identified goals and solutions, as well as strategies that support you in achieving those goals.

Like many, you are busy and tell yourself you don’t have time to change your life or realize your personal goals. However, you don’t have to change much to begin the process of transformation. It is realistic to expect that you will have to work both in and out of our coaching sessions but it only takes small steps to begin the course of change. It’s not necessarily the big decisions that have most impact in our lives, it’s the small daily practices and behaviors that gain momentum and create lasting change.

I invite you to take one small step and begin to tap into your life compass.

Living from a deeper, more connected place can begin with small steps but may utimately require deep change - tapping into our internal compass, then making a conscious choice to follow it:

Ultimately, deep change…is a spiritual process. Loss of alignment occurs when, for whatever reason, we begin to pursue the wrong end. This process begins innocently enough. In pursuing some justifiable end, we make a trade-off of some kind. We know it is wrong, but we rationalize our choice. We use the end to justify the means. As time passes, something inside us starts to wither. We are forced to live at the cognitive level, the rational, goal-seeking level. We lose our vitality and begin to work from sheer discipline. Our energy is not naturally replenished, and we experience no joy in what we do. We are experiencing a slow death…We must acknowledge our own weakness, greed, insensitivity, and lack of vision and courage. If we do so, we begin to understand the clear need for a course correction, and we slowly begin to reinvent our self.  Robert E. Quinn - organizational behavior and human resource management expert and consultant - (1996).

Are you ready for a course correction? Ready to re-ignite the dwindling flame? To schedule a free 20 minute consult send me a message or call me @919-809-9101.

For information about coaching, read on…

To clarify, coaching is NOT psychotherapy. Coaching focuses on assisting people with getting their lives on course and designing their future rather than helping them heal past wounds. My training and years of experience as a mental health professional can bring clarity, understanding and depth to our coaching sessions and this has its benefits but coaching and psychotherapy are distinct and separate services and I will recommend a referral if psychotherapy is more appropriate. I offer a free 15-20 minute consult if you have questions and want assistance in determining what service fits best for you.

David Ellis, author of “Life coaching: A New Career for Helping Professionals” provides a good definition of life coaching:

Life coaches assist people to discover what they want in life and unlock their own brilliance to achieve it. Life coaching is about people generating their own answers, not looking outside of themselves for solutions. This process is not about teaching what you already know or about clients acting as students. Instead, life coaching is empowering people to invent something new—to think something they’ve never thought before and to say something they’ve never said before. (Ellis, 1998)

M. Scot Peck, M.D. (1978) reminds us of the importance of responsibility and commitment in solving life’s problems:

…we must accept responsibility for a problem before we can solve it. We cannot solve a problem by saying “It’s not my problem.” We cannot solve a problem by hoping someone else will solve it for us. I can solve a problem only when I say “This is my problem and it’s up to me to solve it.” But many, so many, seek to avoid the pain of their problems by saying to themselves: “This problem was caused by other people, or by social circumstances beyond my control, and therefore it is up to other people or society to solve this problem for me. It is not really my personal problem.”

Yes, as L. J. Cardinal Suenen’s points out, taking responsibility for our lives takes courage but often has big rewards: “Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true.”