What is Life Coaching?

Coaches help people like you navigate transitions, set goals and priorities for life, make important changes, lower stress, create action plans and more. So how does coaching really work?

Coaching is the art of helping people grow and maximize their potential without telling them what to do. In a coaching relationship, you choose what you want to work on, you set your own goals and actions—in other words, you are always in charge. What I bring to the table as a coach is a set of professional skills for helping you identify what you really want in life and business, design action plans to reach those goals, and get those things done.

Here are some examples of what I can provide as a coach:

• Unconditional support and consistent encouragement
• An advocate who will challenge you and call out the very best in you
• Practical techniques for redefining priorities, getting control of your schedule and leading a healthy, balanced life
• The insight and perspective you need to take on the negative inner voices that hold you back
• An environment of complete acceptance where you can brainstorm, strategize, and envision your ideal future without inhibitions
• Goal-setting and action-planning structures to convert your dreams into realities

Coaching vs. Other Disciplines

You might ask, how is coaching different than mentoring or counseling?

Counselors, mentors, consultants, etc., while having their valuable niche and purpose, are basically seen as the expert who tells the client what to do. Coaches, on the other hand, view the client as the expert and help you to draw from the well of your own insight and ability.

Where mentors give wise advice based on their own experience, coaches help you design your own goals and your own action steps to get there, then hold you accountable to your own ideas. Coaches have mastered the art of believing in people instead of telling them what to do.

And where a counselor’s goal is to move hurting people toward wholeness, coaches help people who are basically whole maximize their lives. Counseling focuses on the past, but coaching focuses on the future.

Over and over, people who work with a great coach find they can reach higher and accomplish more than they ever thought they could on their own.

Coaches are Change Experts    

In short, coaches are professionally trained experts in the art of making life changes. Using tools like values inventories, destiny-discovery exercises, personality assessments, support structures and action planning, I’ll help you focus in on what’s most important and get it done. If you want to make major changes in your life, there is nothing quite like having a change expert—a coach—in your corner.  

“If you put a small value on yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price.”

Anonymous

“It makes you wonder. All the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.” 

General Benjamin in Bel Canto

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
- George Eliot