Individual Adult Life Coaching

Is Life Coaching for me?

When you hire a coach, you’re in for an amazing journey!

A lot of folks confuse life coaching with another powerful service: therapy.

Therapy uses a variety of tools to examine one’s past, address old wounds, and invite the client to heal toward a more whole and healthy life experience. There’s nothing wrong with this – on the contrary, for many, it’s a crucial step along the way to having the lives they want.

However – therapy differs from coaching in three important ways.

The first is the focus – therapy often focuses on the past. Coaching focuses on the present and the future.

The second is the actual goal. In therapy, a therapist moves the client from dysfunction to healthy function. Coaching focuses on building whatever you want for your life. Coaching doesn’t merely “fix” something broken; it constantly creates something new, something that wasn’t there before.

The third is the source of expertise. When dealing with mental illness, the therapist rightly takes on the role of the expert and provides answers, diagnoses, and treatment approaches. In a coaching relationship, YOU are the expert! The coach asks questions, but your answers matter most.

A Helpful Analogy

If you’re hiking along a trail and your foot catches a tree root, you might stumble and twist your ankle. You’re in pain, and you also have a hard time hiking.

So, you set your pack down, take your boot off, test your foot’s range of motion, experiment with putting a bit of weight on it. You take some Advil, wrap a brace around it, and put ice on it.

Comprehensively, these steps take your ankle from debilitating pain toward functioning. Eventually, you make it home safely to rest up more fully.

This is therapy.

And Its Parallel

However, imagine you’re hiking along a trail you’ve been on many times – when you suddenly notice a side trail you’ve never seen before. Intrigued, you observe this trail winds into a more densely wooded forest and up a mountain. It looks breathtaking – but are you prepared for such a challenge?

Concerns about your equipment, your fitness level – even the last time, when you twisted your ankle – suddenly flood your mind. The trail you’re on now is well-traveled – you run into other hikers every few minutes.

This other trail seems more secluded – isolated – but ever so beautiful and compelling. Part of you longs to see the magnificent lookout at the top of the path, while the rest of you wrestles with your fears.

In the end, your courage wins out, and you decide the best way to reach the unexplored top is to enlist a fellow hiker – one who can point out your untied shoelace or the handhold you didn’t see.

Someone to share their water and their more detailed map. Someone to remind you of the beauty at the top when you’re feeling winded. And most of all – someone to celebrate the view at the top.

This is coaching.

Doing vs. Being

Many people consider coaching limited to setting goals, constructing a plan, and carrying out that plan. To be sure, the coaching process involves all these things. But so what? Can’t a person do those things without the aid of a coach?

In the coaching realm, we see that doing – especially certain kinds of doing – springs forth from being. But if the type of doing – the actions, the patterns, the habits, the disciplines – isn’t creating the life that you want, how will you address the being.

To use a basic example, let’s say your goal is weight loss. That can involve a lot of doing – eating differently, exercising, and getting enough rest. And within those three categories, a bunch more doing – shopping differently, eating out less, cooking more (which also means more dirty dishes and more cleaning the kitchen), and, and, and…

Many people think the doing is “where it’s at.”

But who are you being in this realm of your life?

Are you being a harsh disciplinarian, a voice of shame, perfectionism, and blame? Are you being a victim where every mistake somehow is someone else’s fault? Are you being absent and detached?

If you are being a certain way with this goal, then you’re going to run into some disappointment. No amount of positive doing will override a negative being.

And a disempowered being will always win out in a fight with productive doing.

But there’s good news! You have a choice!

You can choose who you’re being in this – and every – situation.

You can do the actions of a healthy person while relating to yourself as a fitness failure, and your progress won’t last long – or you can choose a way of being FIRST – and then do the actions that fall in line with that.

Aside from accomplishing your fitness goals, your being will shift. You’ll experience an alignment between your perspective, your thoughts/feelings, and your actions.

And your choice leads to power.

By examining your being around any area of your life – romantic relationships, career goals, money, recreation, rest, fitness, raising children, taking risks, organizing your time, and a thousand other things – you gain access to power to decide how those areas of your life will go.

What previously seemed scary, difficult, or downright impossible transforms into something full of potential, excitement, and power!

That is the magic of coaching.

Start getting the support you need today – call (443) 281-3074.