If you’re like lots of folks, you might not know what life coaching is and are confused about it. You might even think it's someone telling you how to live your life. If you’re confused, that’s cool, I’ll shed light on this shortly. But if you think coaching is about someone telling you how to live your life, that would be pretty far from the truth. If anything life coaching is about the client telling their life coach how to live their life. Even more confused? That’s quite alright, lol.
See in life coaching, whether you’re getting the service for career advancement, health improvement, gaining clarity to better deal with emotions and stressors, or many other things; as a life coach we automatically believe that you know what you need. We want you to trust yourself. Your instincts, your heart, your intuition.
We’re not going to tell you how to live your life, we’re going to work with you, so you figure out how to live your life better. Because you are your own best advocate for the life you desire. Sometimes though, we get very used to not listening to our best ourselves. Life coaching helps you jumpstart that process again.
"Coaching helps with...health improvement, gaining clarity to better deal with emotions and stressors or many other things"
But how exactly do we do that? We ask you a bunch of questions, I mean like a lot. Lol. We ask so many questions because people by and large don’t really understand how they make decisions. That’s not meant to be denigrating, I’m a coach (obviously) and it was only in recent years that the direction of my life started to make any sense to me.
Why did I choose destructive actions over healthy ones? Why did I feel such turmoil when faced with decisions that made me uncomfortable and distraught? This was because I previously didn’t know why I made the decisions I made or why I felt the way I did until I got some therapy and coaching.
"...you are your own best advocate for the life you desire. Sometimes though, we get very used to not listening to our best ourselves."
So in a really common example; maybe you’re depressed or anxious or both, or bored, and feeling like you’re suffering from whiplash because your life feels painful, uneventful, or intolerable and you wonder how you got here, to feeling this bad. In a coaching session, we work backwards, see what decision led to another decision, to another decision and so on.
As the question and answer process progresses, in a safe way, but steadily moving forward you start to analyze why you thought "that was the only decision I had at the time." When it fact you had many more. Life coaching is also about empowering you to know that you have choices and that you don't have to stay stuck where you are. There is in fact room to move, to change, to have joy.
Pretty soon, you've uncovered your motivations for doing things and the previous experiences that told you there were limits. Because in coaching the million dollar question is: “Do you want to continue making decisions that are sabotaging and frustrating or do you want rewards and success?”.
Nine times out of ten, we want rewards and success! And that’s something that life coaches call ourselves “Change Agents”. We facilitate a clients personal evolution in whatever category of their life they are seeking that change to gain the rewards and success they deserve.
Trust, as human beings, we like to sabotage our happiness and success a lot. Not because we’re broken, but because we’re usually very unaware of what really drives us, what is really important to us, and how to execute our lives with our drive and values at the forefront of our mind. There are a lot of moving parts to living and adulting, and this confusion in executing decisions that bring you more of what you want in life and less of what you don't want, is precisely what life coaching helps with.
What are your next steps to living out your values? What toxic behaviors, people, and patterns do you want to eliminate? What education, information, and support do you need to get from point A (where you don’t want to be) to point B (where you do want to be)? And furthermore, how do you do that as quickly and efficiently as possible? Because who wishes to stay miserable “figuring stuff out”?
Get your game plan, take the action, get rewarding results. Are there hiccups in this process? Yes, yes, and yes. That is why it’s called growth, because it’s not a straight forward path. It can be winding, set backs can occur, but with a life coach you can analyze, shift gears, and make a new and better plan, and ultimately reach your goal.
Life coaching is not therapy, we help you look into your past, but for insight into the present, not just to belabor old pains in the hopes of releasing them. One of the best ways to release old pains is to find new joys and continue repeating the process. Life coaching will help you find your joy. That sounds pretty terrific, doesn’t it?
Santee Blakey is a Life Coach and Licensed Massage Therapist at Soul Growth Wellness. When she's not biking, reading, or biking, or reading (she needs new hobbies, suggest her some:-), she'll be writing and enjoying a caramel frappacino in her favorite Starbucks (this is obviously pre-Covid) *sigh*. Follow her on Youtube for her series --> Self Acceptance: What It's Really Like (A Journey).