Do I need a life coach?
In its simplest terms, a life coach is someone who helps clients identify, pursue, and achieve goals. It is often confused with consulting or mentoring, sometimes even by people who identify themselves as coaches. It is also sometimes perceived to be a form of therapy. While, all these other forms of support can be useful and appropriate, life coaching resides in its own niche among these services.
Sometimes, I find the best way to describe the work is to contrast it with those things it is not. Coaching is not therapy. The easiest way to draw that distinction is to say a therapist is most often addressing a specific issue or illness rooted in heredity or past experience, often unpacking past trauma or addressing mental illness. Therapy is medical treatment focused on addressing existing conditions. In contrast, coaching is forward and future facing, focused on identifying and achieving specific goals. It is not designed and should not be used to treat mental illness or replace any form of medical treatment. (Run, don’t walk, away from a coach who doesn’t point you towards proper medical intervention and therapeutic support when treatment is what you need.)
Coaching is not consulting or mentoring. You might hire a consultant to assist in your business, telling you step-by-step how to run a social media marketing campaign-- because they are an expert in social media marketing. You might find a membership group of working moms where you can identify a mentor mom who has gone through the experience of raising three kids while working full time outside the home. Both consulting and mentoring involve engaging with a subject matter expert in an identified field who is going to give you detailed direction or advice about how to solve a specific problem in your life or work. In short, they tell you what to do, based on having previous experience in the issue you are trying to solve. Neither of these is coaching. (Run, don’t walk, away from a life coach who just keeps telling you that they had the same problem you have now and you should just do exactly what they did in order to get to exactly where they are now.)
The therapist, mentor and consultant all have specialized subject matter knowledge they are going to apply to your current condition and give you a course of action that (maybe) solves your problem FOR you. There are times this is the exact right thing for the current challenge in front of you. (And, to be fair and clear, many therapists integrate coaching techniques in support of their patients, creating a bridge from past healing to future preparedness.) In contrast, a coach is there to support you in rooting out the specific subject matter expertise you have, because you are the expert of your own life. A coach will rarely give direct advice or give a prescribed course of action in order to solve the challenge you might currently be facing. They are instead equipped with a supportive toolkit including deep listening, non-judgement, and exploratory questioning designed to help you get into the details of what you think, what you want, what you find important, and what skills you would like to improve in order to realize the life you envision. A coach will hold you accountable, give you tools that help you better understand the things that are important to you, assist in crafting goals that will actively move your life in the direction you want, and practice life skills that will help you take those goals and turn them into actionable plans you are more likely to truly execute on.
Instead of telling you how to solve the problem, or plain old solving the problem, a coach helps you solve your own problems (sometimes they also help you get clear on what is really the problem in the first place.) A coach is a compassionate ear, a cheer-leading friend, a gentle (or not) reminder of your commitments, and unfailing champion for your most important wants. They can help you find an organizational system that works for your life and tasks, ways of relating to friends and family that let you enjoy deep relationships with healthy boundaries, a process for developing confidence and personal accountability and life systems that help you quiet external expectations in order to get and stay in touch with your own guiding values and purpose.
Life in the modern world is increasingly complex, we have more information flooding our brains, less deep and supportive relationships, and less time spent sorting through the noise to get clear on what we want to make of our own lives. A coach’s primary purpose is to help you make your one and precious life as gloriously spectacular as it can possibly be.
You are whole and unbroken. You are the expert of your own life. Surround yourself with a team of people who believe in and support you.
So. Who doesn’t need a life coach?
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