When I think of “coaching”, I think of someone with specific expertise who can teach, educate, instruct and train. A coach motivates and inspires you to work towards achieving a degree of excellence, to optimize your performance, to go from good to better to great. A coach is encouraging and supportive but is honest and points out your weaknesses and mistakes so you can increase your self-awareness over time and become more of your own coach.
My personal view of coaching is that it is skills based, whether it be to help with goal setting, staying focused, maintaining concentration, developing resources to deal with adversity, managing time and energy and related areas.
Coaching mostly addresses what is happening in the present and what you want to achieve in the future. There is far less a focus on the past and early childhood experiences. As such, individuals seeking coaching should be generally emotionally stable and high functioning, free of any acute high stress and issues of major anxiety or depression. While these issues and problems are not necessarily incompatible with life coaching, the individual should be working with or referred to a psychologist or other qualified mental health professional.
In coaching, there is considerable flexibility on the frequency and length of sessions and contacts are often conducted via phone or video calls. There is no “medical necessity” for meetings so no formal diagnosis is given and “clients” pay out of pocket with no reimbursement by insurance.
Life coaching can address many areas of a person’s life from making job related decisions, being more successful in dating strategies, setting goals and priorities, learning to balance work, play and relationships, performing better at your job, managing time better, overcoming procrastination, losing weight, staying motivated in working out and many other issues that arise across the life span.
While psychologists can be life coaches, life coaches cannot be psychologists or other mental health professionals unless they have a State license. At the present moment, ANYONE can call himself or herself a life coach and have little or no training to do so.
There are a great many reasons for the popularity of Life coaching. Here are several of the main ones:
Reason 1. Life Coaching is perceived to benefit highly functioning, generally stable individuals who are stuck, struggling with a difficult life decision or a looking for more expert advice or skills training to help them perform better in some areas of their life.
Reason 2. Life coaching focuses more on the present and the future.
Reason 3. Life coaching is goal oriented, solution focused and tends to conclude over months rather than years and often with measurable results.
Reason 4. Life coaching is more direct, interactive and often involve the coach teaching the client new skills to accomplish their goals.
Reason 5. Life coaching can be virtual via the phone or a video platform. As such, Life coaching allows great flexibility and convenience for the client and coach alike.
Reason 6. Because of the focus on resolving current issues and or teaching new skills, clients reach goals in a shorter period of time.
