What is life coaching?

By Vasos Silivistris

Life coaching has grown to be a hugely successful form of talking therapy, to the extent that it has helped turn people’s lives around.

A life coach is someone who looks to empower others by helping them make, meet and exceed goals in both their personal and professional lives.

Where would athletes be without their coaches to train, support and cheer them on to achieve their goals? Imagine having your coach who is there solely to support and encourage you, to offer constructive criticism and valuable insights into your behaviour and to help you perform at your peak.

Life coaching is a tool for people wanting to maximise their personal and professional potential.

What does coaching do?

Coaching is an interactive process where the coach guides and facilitates progress towards defined goals. These may concern relationships, career, self-confidence, or, a more general goal of ‘getting life back on course.’

For many people, the trigger for a life coach can be as specific as a new job, relationship breakdown, illness or simply feeling that life is moving so quickly that you have lost control.

A good life coach will help you to find direction in various aspects of your life, including relationships, goal setting, stress management, motivation and health. A life coach cannot guarantee that you will leap to the top of the company, but he or she can help you self-regulate, define where you want to go and help you get there via small, realistic steps.

A coach is often the missing link, filling in the gap between books, workshops and seminars. Working in partnership with you to help you create and achieve the vision for the future you desire, a life coach will focus on the present and the future, not the past.

Coaching is about finding solutions rather than analysing or unravelling why there is a problem. Life coaching is oriented towards finding and creating the future you want and helping you take the action necessary to achieve your life transformation. Coaching motivates people to push themselves further than they have gone before.

A life coach will:

Encourage you to be the best you can be.
Challenge you to dream bigger than you have ever dared.
Identify goals and support you as you reach those goals quickly.
Facilitate changes in limiting thinking and behaviour patterns.
Provide the structure, tools and perspectives to help you along.
Cheer from the sidelines while you chase your dreams.
Expect more of you than you expect of yourself.

How does coaching achieve this?

By helping you to set powerful, compelling goals so that you are clear about your life’s direction.
Providing the structure to help you stick to your guns, even when the going gets tough.
Focusing on where you are now, where you want to be, and the best way to get there.
Helping you to think laterally to create options and opportunities, and then think deeply about the choices you wish to make.
Giving you a systematic process that avoids the overwhelming feeling of ‘Where do I start?’
Setting deadlines to give the whole process more urgency and importance.
Working within specific time frames (long enough to complete the project, but short enough to stay focused and motivated.
Encouraging you to identify and eliminate old obstructive, destructive habits and teaching you how to develop new productive habits instead.
Asking you the hard questions and holding you to what you say you want and will do.
Helping you to stay committed to yourself and your goals.

Dr Vasilios Silivistris (Vasos) is a psychotherapist, counselling practitioner psychotherapycounselling.uk/