Life Coaching is a method of facilitating learning which has been developed predominantly in America over the past fifteen or so years. Some of the techniques have been adapted from the methods used by top athletes to achieve success, others come from psychology, education and management training.

As coaching has grown as a profession, many specialist types of coaching have developed: Life Coaching, Executive Coaching, Performance Coaching, Relationship Coaching, Teen Coaching, Group Coaching, ADD Coaching, etc., etc. The list gets longer and more confusing each day.

Life Coaching: basic assumptions

Ultimately there are many different styles of life coaching within a basic framework. This framework assumes:

• The role of the life coach is to help you discover what you want and how you feel about things, clarifying your thoughts and helping you to express them in a form that leads to constructive action and change. This "goal-setting" has come to be seen as a central feature of coaching but can take many different forms, from simple, practical, short-term targets to a profound reassessment of your entire life and its direction.

Coaching do's and don'ts

Coaches do:

• ask questions,
• offer encouragement, support and possible strategies,
• challenge fixed pre-conceptions,
• push you that little bit further towards your target.

Coaches don't necessarily:

• provide solutions,
• tell you what to do,
• pass judgement
• psychoanalyse you.

Life coaching versus therapy?

Coaching may seem merely to be another "talking therapy" spiced up with "goal-setting"... Why not find a "proper therapist" or just talk to a friend?

Actually, in many cases life coaches may have training or experience in psychotherapy - I personally spent 17 years training and working in counselling and psychotherapy before making the transition to coaching. The distinctions between coaching and cognitive therapy or some of the other "brief therapy" approaches can sometimes be hard to discern in practice.

But there are differences: life coaching and therapy are based on different beliefs about the individual and the way they deal with problems. Coaching focuses on resolving specific problems and helping you visualise a future path, assuming that as you learn better coping skills and feel more confident, you will be able to address other areas of difficulty in your life. An understanding of the past is often helpful in anticipating obstacles and taking preventive action, but the emphasis in coaching is on clarifying and moving towards your future objective. Therapy, on the other hand, is largely about understanding and healing damage which has occurred in the past but repeats in the present. (See the article "What is Psychodynamic Coaching?" for more on these distinctions.)

Straw into gold...

The real skill in life coaching - and what you are paying for - is spinning straw into gold, or to put it differently, the coach's capacity to translate your confusion and insights into a form where they become a series of achievable steps leading to a different life.

Why not try it for yourself?

Contact me to arrange a reduced fee introductory coaching session now...

Introductory coaching sessions cost just £25 for aproximately 1 hour - half the standard hourly rate.