The goal of a life coach is to help you to have a great life. This involves a sense of meaning, purpose and fulfilment, along with liberal doses of happiness and the ability to deal powerfully with things when they go wrong. As humans we get bored if we feel like we’re not moving forward, but the big question often is which direction to move in. To establish this we need to understand our core values, and set a continual stream of achievable goals based on those values. Setting goals gives us something to focus our efforts on, and achieving goals builds our sense of life satisfaction and self-esteem, and inspires us and the people around us on to further goals. It’s important that the goals we set are achievable, consistent with our values, and allow us to use and develop our personal strengths.
The coaches I know use a structured set of exercises sent to you via E-mail in order to guide the coaching process and ensure that you get the maximum value out of it. The exercises start by examining your sense of purpose and mission in life, your values and your big-picture life goals. They then expand into more specific areas that you’d like to work on, such as self-esteem, relationships and financial goals. As you complete each exercise, you discuss what you have discovered with your coach, who gives you feedback on the intermediate goals that you have set, and then send you the next exercise as you work towards your big-picture goals. The aim is to implement the ideas that you come up with in your life so that you get to achieve the goals that you have set for yourself.
A good coach acts as your impartial but supportive sounding board. You can bounce ideas of them, talk about your goals and why they are important to you, and about the process you want to put in place to achieve them. They’ll be supportive and straight with you about how you’re going and about any areas which you may have overlooked. They can help you identify problem areas, like instances where you’ve set goals which appear to be incongruent with your own values. Everything is structured around your personal values, rather than theirs, so that you get the most out of your life. Often in life we spend a lot of time and effort trying to live according to other people’s values, and this is a recipe for lack of fulfilment, despair, burnout and ultimately depression. I know from personal experience what that feels like, which is why a good coach doesn’t force their values down your throat. They get you to come up with your own values and then use them to support your goal setting and achievement so that you feel maximally fulfilled.
Having a coach to offer encouragement and accountability ensures that our good intentions actually get acted out so that we can have more powerful results in our lives. Back when I was coaching, one of my clients commented to me:
I was reading an article in the paper on the weekend. It was talking about how people make new years resolutions and then don’t follow through with them. One of the suggestions to staying on track was to not go it alone. I can now definitely see how feed back, support and motivation from an external source makes things a bit easier and also gives you someone to be accountable to. I’m also finding it good to sit down and actually think about what my values are to actually verbalise them and see them written.
The whole process is directed by what you want to get out of life, and you can proceed at whatever pace you like. You need to commit to spend an average of at least an hour a week working on the exercises. Of course as soon as you do this, something is bound to come up; the process is flexible, so if there are some weeks where you’re flat out dealing with immediate crises and can’t do the exercises, that’s OK. You may end up doing some work on why your life operates in crisis mode more of the time than you would like. To stay on track with your coaching, you need to put some time aside to do it, and this will invariably mean giving up something else, but the cost will be worth it. Being coached means making a serious commitment to your own personal growth and development. Your coach can guide you through the process, and making yourself accountable to me will help with your motivation, but ultimately the willingness to be coached needs to come from you. Your biggest breakthroughs will come in the areas where you currently have blind spots in your thinking, so there will be some adjustments to be made in the way you think. Change and growth can be difficult on your own, but the net gain will always outweigh the pain and you can expect to get a buzz out of the coaching process. When you are in touch with your personal strengths and using them to work towards goals that are set in accordance with your values, you can expect to have greater energy and motivation because you’re getting what you really want out of life.
Since most of the action happens via E-mail, you don’t need to be geographically close to your coach. I’m currently exploring other avenues in my own life, so I’m not taking on any coaching clients right now, but I know a network of coaches I can put you in touch with. So if you’re interested in taking your whole life to the next level, contact me.
If this was helpful, please consider sending me a donation via PayPal to say "Thanks!"
0 Comments