A life coach assists with your life goals and your mindset. Have you ever been on a team, like a sports team, a corporate team, etc.? They all had a coach or someone to guide and/or direct them. Millions of people around the world have benefited from coaching in one way or another. But why should you consider a life coach? And if you decided you wanted to pursue one, what should you look for in potential candidates? Let’s take a look at the benefits of a life coach and what they can do for you.
Benefits of a life coach
A typical session involves the coach listening to you and providing effective feedback to encourage personal growth. Coaches measure and discuss growth on performance-based outcomes, such as your best experience with your goals in the past week, the percentage of achievement you reached for that goal, your contribution that led to that level of success, and what you learned from the experience.
When working with a coach, they can help you:
- create a clear vision of your goals
- make realistic timelines to reach those goals
- help you build better relationships
- helps you find more meaning in your life
- boosts your confidence
- works with you on your spiritual growth
- helps you make career changes
- helps you to keep yourself responsible and accountable
A coach can also help you remove procrastination from your life, earn more money, create better support systems, improve time-management skills, minimize stress, and increase productivity. These attributes can help us elevate so many areas of our life for self-improvement and better success each day.
With the client always in the driver’s seat, the coach simply assists in the navigation that leads to the desired destination. A life coach helps you reach the next level of life through strategic methods that liberate the mind, strengthen the body, and encourage the spirit. They change and shape lives by tapping into the power within. Coaches are change agents in an ever-changing world.
Challenges are best tackled in pairs. Along the way, a coach will help to identify what motivates you and how you can use that motivation to push forward. Then, they teach you new habits that will support you in maintaining the changes you make. Coaches focus on assisting with elements that are specifically related to the area of your life that they can help you make progress in.
Evolving technology and its effect on life coaching
As baby boomers age, over 75 million American millennials will create demand for coaching services. Webinars, coaching apps, and online delivery via video conferencing will be the norm for personal and life coaching in the next few years (versus the traditional method of working over the phone). Coaches and clients alike can connect from the comfort of their respective homes. In this fast-paced society, coaching sessions are much more productive when both parties don’t have to worry about maintaining eye contact and reading non-verbal cues. This major demographic shift presents a good opportunity for coaches to assist clients with re-evaluating stereotypes and negative assumptions. A coach helps to open a new world of wellness and positive energy, evolving how an individual looks at things.
Don’t hold back
To get the most out of working with a life coach, it is important to share all necessary information about your life, any struggles you want to address, and your personality. These details help the coach analyze your current situation and determine what (if any) is preventing you from reaching your goals. Then, the coach will help you develop a timeline and give you a breakdown of exactly what is needed to focus on to make it all happen.
The foundation of a good coaching relationship is trust and authenticity. This allows for vulnerability. Individuals who open themselves to being vulnerable also experience growth in self-compassion (Moore, et al., 2016). Researcher Kristin Neff (2019) defines this as a combination of self-kindness, mindfulness, and a sense of common humanity.
A Look at the Research
Many of the effects of coaching or mentoring come from applying knowledge obtained from social science research. For example, the Self-Determination Theory of Motivation is “the end game of coaching” (Moore, et al., 2016).
The author describes this as a person’s ability to reach their peak in “motivation, engagement, performance, persistence, and creativity.” The coach’s job is to ensure that the environment meets three psychological needs. They are autonomy, competence, and relatedness, as defined by Deci and Ryan (1985).
According to Moore and colleagues, other areas affecting the growth and legitimacy of coaching include:
- Design Thinking – A human-centered method that helps people find creative solutions to problems (Bayer, 2018).
- Flow Theory – Also known as “being in the zone,” this is an immersive experience that yields peak performance.
- Social Cognitive Theory – Postulates that learning happens in social contexts. It is the interplay between a person, their environment, and behavior (LaMorte, 2018).
- Adult and constructive development – Conceived by Bob Kegan, this theory focuses on “growth and elaboration of a person’s ways of understanding the self and the world” (Palus & Horth, 2016).
Clients benefit when coaches use the following approaches: Individual coaching, Self-coaching, or Group training. They found that individual coaching and group training reduced procrastination. People in the individual coaching group experienced greater satisfaction and goal attainment. Group training positively influenced pertinent knowledge acquisition. The self-coaching group performed exercises independently. People in this group had difficulty attaining higher goals. The researchers determined that these participants needed coaching support.
About the Author: Jonita Bankhead
Jonita (Jo.) says “I have already experienced your current situation. Allow me to help you. My life has presented me the opportunity to experience positive transformation, by way of many challenging situations. God’s mercy and grace have given me wisdom and the endurance to grow through anxiety, pain, and struggles resulting in change, joy, and peace, all directly related to: singleness, marriage, divorce, 2nd marriage, raising children, death, entrepreneurship, job loss, career change, continuing education, and finally, aging gracefully. I have been there, done that! Book a session with me so I can help you get unstuck.”
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