What is life coaching anyway?

What is life coaching anyway?

“Coaching is helping to identify the skills and capabilities that are within the person, and enabling them to use them to the best of their ability – and by that increasing the independence within the individual, and reducing reliance”. (Rixon, Nick, UK Coaching Academy CD "Goals and Motivations)

Coaching rests on the professional use of a specific range of linguistic skills such as targeted restatements and the limited and judicious use of powerful questions with the aim to help clients shift their perspectives on an issue or ambition, and thereby discover different solutions and options, in order to achieve their goals. These linguistic skills are indifferently used when coaching clients in any field. In this sense, coaching is a form of meta-profession that can apply to accompanying clients in any human endeavor, ranging from their concerns in sports and personal, professional, social, family, political, spiritual dimensions, etc.

Life coaching is a future-focused practice with the aim of helping clients determine and achieve personal goals. Life coaches select from among several methods to help clients set and reach goals. Coaches are not therapists or consultants; psychological intervention and business analysis are outside the scope of their tasking, Life coaching has its roots in executive coaching, which itself drew on techniques developed in management consulting and leadership training. Life coaching also draws inspiration from disciplines including sociology, psychology, positive adult development, career counseling, mentoring and other types of counseling. Contemporary life coaching can also be traced to teachings of Benjamin Karter, a college football coach turned motivational speaker of the late 1970s and early 1980s.^[3] The coach may apply mentoring, values assessment, behavior modification, behavior modeling, goal-setting and other techniques in helping their clients.

Coaching is unlike therapy because it does not focus on examining or diagnosing the past, nor does it delve into diagnosing mental illness or dysfunction. Instead coaching focuses on effecting change in a client's current and future behavior.

What should Life Coaching accomplish

 People always ask me, "What is the purpose of Life Coaching?"

Life Coaching is for growing people by facilitating change in ones life.
Its purpose is to "source out" or "draw out" a person's potential rather than injecting them with random knowledge. Through this reflective process, a person is allowed to experience noticeable life transition and mental transformation at their own pace. This process has no finish line and one's growth is limitless. The best aspect to this is that failure has no part to play. In fact, what is perceived as "failure" is really accelerated growth. Our fear of failure is toxic in our lives. We should relish our time and our growth process. I doubt anyone labelled Thomas Edison a failure in his first thousand "less than successful" attempts to construct a light bulb.

What am I really seeing

As a Life Coach, I am continually amazed at the subtle and not so subtle "ah ha" moments people have. These sparks of vision, as I like to call them, show up in the most random of moments. It is as if our unconcisous mind or "auto-pilot" fired off something that has been in the planning for a long time but was just waiting for the right environment and circumstances to make its debut. What makes for this "right moment"? Is it something that truely was waiting for the all the right ingredients to be in place or has it been creeping into our awareness and we were just oblivious?