What is life coaching and how does it help?
Life coaching or just coaching is a relatively new practice in its current form. In summary, coaching (life coaching) is the practice of helping people identify, clarify and prioritise goals, develop an action plan and be accountable for executing it. Those goals can be both personal and/or professional. Now, this is maybe a little too stiff of a definition so let’s get into it with more depth and add the layer of empathy and holding space.
Through centuries there have been coaches in the forms of spiritual leaders, gurus and just people who were deemed wiser than the rest. The concept is not new and it is observed through history in different ways. It has become exceptionally popular though over the least 10 years, as awareness around mental health, self realisation and actualisation has sky rocketed. People are more and more eager to understand themselves, their patterns, their conditioning and live to their potential.
Coaching is not therapy though and the terms should not be interchanged. Therapists are medically licensed professionals, who have medical and post graduate training. They can prescribe medicine, can assess mental license and are licensed to treat clinical conditions. Coaching on the other hand is not something that requires a specific degree but of course it is strongly encouraged for all coaches to pursue continuous education and certification. A coach is not medical professional, they do not provide medical advice.
A coach is a person who due to life experience (or divine intervention, whatever the client is looking for, as there are branches of coaching that deal with spirituality) can offer structured guidance to others, helping them on their journey in life or at work.
How does life coaching work?
The reason why there is no degree for being a coach per se, is because coaching comes with experience and always on learning. You cannot graduate at being better at life than others. Or at least we do not know how to keep that specific score, just yet. However, there are a lot of useful certifications to become an effective coach and give the best value to your clients. Ultimately a coach is there to do 4 main things in order to get their clients to the required results:
Guide their clients through practices that help them clarify their goals and thoughts
Keep their clients accountable for the commitments they made
Remind them of their strength when they are weak or lost
Cheer them on to the finish line.
Sounds easy (maybe) but supporting someone through a period of change, confusion, life transformation, anxiety or burnout is not a straightforward path. This takes technique, empathy, experience and holding a lot of space for the other person. Not everyone in this world can hold space for others, this is why, although coaching seems easy, it actually takes a specific type of person to be able to accommodate human emotion adequately. The remark about ‘holding space’ went so viral after the ‘Wicked’ interview and the little finger holding, so it is looked at with a bit of irony nowadays. However, truly holding space for another human being, not judging, not bringing your own personal bias, your own daily problems and moods into your coaching session, is an incredible skill that a coach needs to master.
Why should I work with a coach and not go to a therapist then?
The two are not interchangeable, as I already mentioned and they serve 2 different purposes. Many people actually work with coaches and therapists together for the best outcome, as the 2 look at 2 different sets of human behaviour. A coach will help you identify the life you want to live. What is that North Star for you? Where do you want to go? Then, the coach will help you structure a path to get there, tell you the signs to look out for, the thoughts that should be registered more and maybe written down. The coach opens your mind to awareness of the here and now, and guides you to that future version of yourself. Coaches work entirely with the future in mind and help you create actionable steps (sometimes very small ones) that help you get there. Discussions of the past can intertwine into some of the conversations for context but coaches do not spend time there, do not dwell and do not try to unpack what happened. We are only interested in working towards the future and figuring out how we can help get a client there. This is why I say that therapy and coaching cannot be used interchangeably at all. At best they work hand in hand, not one or the other.
