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LIFE COACHING ON THE CHANGE

Written by: Di Holliday

Article Overview: Life coaching is now established and getting well known. Do we continue with the pure coaching or do we look for 'added value' for our clients?

LIFE COACHING ON THE CHANGE

Life Coaching is great, the problem is that is has become the trendy thing to do and Life Coaches are ‘ten a penny’. Some people have used this as a stepping stone to a good income with very little expense and training. Life Coaching is a wonderful tool and a good Life Coach will be able to motivate and enable a client achieve what they want in life.

A good life coach will have experience, not just of life but of a variety of other disciplines. Some may come from a business background, or science, or arts and coaches may be experts in many other fields. The good bit is that these skills can be and are being used along side Life Coaching.

Every coaching session allows the rapport and interaction to develop, going deeper each time, finding the root cause of the blockages or illnesses that have manifested in the clients life, as self-doubt and procrastination

My sister Patricia Wynne, for instance, uses her skills in Hypnotherapy, NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) to get her clients to where they want to be. EFT is especially good at targeting and eliminating self-limiting beliefs and helps to remove emotional blocks while using the principals of Life Coaching, enabling positive changes to be made and consolidated. Another colleague, Claire Doake-Wood specialises in working with stressed families, parents who struggle with the juggling act of work, childcare and money.

My own background in business and finance is great for getting clients to understand their money problems and how to budget and also enables me to provide business and executive coaching. My second career in Complementary Medicine and other alternative therapies gives me scope to help people get healthy and fit.

My client Miss T, an artist and a good one, first came to me for a Nutritional Medicine consultation. She had been suffering from various minor digestive complaints and depression, for which her Doctor had subscribed medication. Miss T was unhappy with the depression medicine as the side effects seemed to her, worst than being depressed. She was also given antacids for the digestive problems, which were no use at all.

Before our consultation I had sent Miss T rather a lot of questionnaires, looking at both her medical and personal life. At our first meeting, after discussing her medical history and current state of health, we talked in depth about her private life, her anxieties and her long term ambitions.

On the medical side I diagnosed Candida Albicans, leaky gut syndrome and stress. All things that leads to depression so treating the root causes of her problems would, in the long term alleviate her low state of mind. On her more ‘Life’ front I could understand her needs. She was in a good relationship living in a nice country town, amongst other things, but needed the stimulation of her peers – in London. So a compromise was proffered; explain to her partner that she needed to make a trip to London every month, to stay with friends and review her creative state. At this time she would also seek people who would refer her more work.

Over the four sessions, as Miss T become aware of her body and how and what to eat, she took on board suggestions to deal with stress, and arranged her life to give her some creative freedom and all in all get a whole lot better.

If I had just given her a diet sheet, it is unlikely that she would have had the courage to make those changes alone and may not have got better at all. I would have had to see her on a separate occasion to address the ‘Life’ part, so by managing the many parts in one, ‘holistically’ our sessions made a bigger impact on her overall wellbeing.

As qualified Life Coaches we are told that we are not here to give advice, only to listen and help our client come to their own conclusions. We are not counsellors or mediators or even therapists. Depending on the training school one has been to, the emphasis can be ‘asking open questions’ always good anyway, setting measurable goals, or providing working material such as the wheel of life and the elicitation of core values and beliefs. All of this is good and basically standard life coaching resources.

But why not more?

Football teams have coaches; they have skills in the game but also need psychology to understand and motivate each team members, have skills in physiotherapy and sports injuries. Just knowing the game is not sufficient to run a good and winning team.

Therefore, surely a good Life Coach should bring more to the table than just a listening ear?

As with the case study referred to earlier, if I had not had the skills in Nutritional Medicine or my long life with skills learned along the way, would I have been as helpful? Should I have left it entirely to her to seek out the answers?

If so, she would have had to undergo the many years of training in nutrition and complementary medicine, and had the relationships that have helped me to form my opinions – just in order to solve her own problems.

Why would she have ever asked for help in the first place?

At what point in our lives do we ask or need an outside influence to help us along?

How can we change our own core beliefs, attitudes and values to improve out life… physically, mentally and emotionally?

These and many more questions are what make a Life Coach think. Think about our own attitudes, beliefs and values and using judgement and personal skills to enhance the coaching experience.

Where now for Life Coaching? Maybe the evolution will continue until we have a more modern and mixed approach to getting our clients to where they want to be, with successful and happy lives.

Related Articles
  Performance coaching in the workplace
  How Coaching Changes Lives
  So what differentiates a Life Coach from a Business Coach from an Executive Coach?
  What Coaching Isn't
  Does Life/Business Coaching Really Work

Article Tags: change, EFTEmotional Freedom Techniques, life coaching



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