Life Coaching
I am currently completing a life coaching course with New Insights Africa that will enable me to practice and register as a life coach with the International Coaches Register, COMENSA, and the CPD Standards Office. I hope to obtain this qualification in the next year.
What Is Life Coaching?
Life coaching is a collaborative process that helps people achieve their goals based on the professional relationship between a client and a life coach established by a contract. It involves a solution-focused approach to personal development aimed at creating transformative and sustainable change in all areas of life through specific tools and techniques. This helps clients realise their true potential by recognising and eliminating obstructive and destructive behavioural and thinking patterns.
Coaching is a relatively new field but has roots in many older established disciplines. It is influenced by areas such as the human potential movement of the 1960s, adult education, personal development, leadership training, and various areas of Psychology. It formally emerged in the 1980s and gained popularity during the 1990s and 2000s. Recently, life coaches have increasingly gained recognition as a growing number of entrepreneurs, creatives, and executives seek life coaching to achieve success in their professional and personal lives.
A life coach can provide guidance that inspires positive changes in a client’s life. This guidance can be general or specific, focusing on areas such as relationships, work, fitness, finances, health, and leadership. They can facilitate discussions that assist the client in finding their purpose, promoting creativity, managing stress, and conquering bad habits that obstruct the client from realising their goals.
Life coaching can help clients:
- Identify their goals.
- Recognise obstacles.
- Draw on their motivations.
- Design and execute solutions to their problems.
- Celebrate their victories.
- Learn from setbacks.
- Build confidence and self-esteem.
- Develop communication and conflict-management skills.
Life Coaching Versus Counselling
While there may be some overlap in the benefits of working with a life coach and a counsellor, these professionals have distinct roles and serve unique purposes. Counsellors focus on helping clients process trauma and other issues of their past and work through adjustment crises in the present. Life coaches are focused on personal development and growth and help clients achieve their goals and dreams, realise their full potential, live their purpose, and develop themselves.
Neither life coaches nor counsellors can diagnose and treat mental health conditions.
What Life Coaching Is NOT
A life coach is NOT a therapist, psychologist, or psychiatrist, and can, therefore, not diagnose or treat mental health conditions.
Life coaching is NOT about dealing with problems as much as finding solutions.
Life coaching is NOT about instructing clients in what they should do, but helping them decide for themselves what they should do.
Life coaching is NOT about giving advice, but helping clients to understand and take their own advice.
Life coaching is NOT about showing clients the way, as much as showing them how to find their own way.
Life coaching is NOT about teaching clients to follow a path, as much as teaching them how to determine what their path is and how to follow it for themselves.
Life coaching is NOT about the life coach being superior, better, or more advanced, but helping clients to possess the skills and tools to be a catalyst for change.
The Benefits of Life Coaching
Working with a life coach can provide you with a fresh, informed perspective on the issues that you face. It offers new insight into challenges and can help you zero in on negative patterns obstructing your success.
- ACCOUNTABILITY: A life coach can help you stay on track by encouraging you to accept responsibility for your actions and break bad habits – thereby motivating you to become the best version of yourself.
- INSIGHT & PERSPECTIVE: Through life coaching, you will gain new insights and fresh perspectives.
- SELF-AWARENESS: You will learn to identify areas for personal growth, reflect on your progress, and gain more confidence in knowing who you are. You will become aware of their strengths and resilience.
- CORE VALUES: A life coach helps you set goals that align with your true values, not others’ expectations. No “shoulds”, “coulds”, or “ought tos”.
- RELATIONSHIPS: Life coaching helps you foster healthier, more fulfilling relationships and navigate the complexities of human connections with grace and empathy because you increasingly recognise your own worth.
- QUALITY OF LIFE: Life coaching helps you to invest in increasing the quality and depth of your life experiences while providing accountability for realising these aims. It creates a deep sense of satisfaction and fulfillment.
- GOAL SETTING: A life coach helps you set realistic targets to effectively achieve your ambitions.
- CONFIDENCE & SELF-ESTEEM: Life coaching can promote confidence and feeling good about yourself by creating a safe, confidential, non-judgemental environment where you can honestly and openly review your achievements and shortcomings.
- MOTIVATION: Life coaching can enable you to stay focused and strive for continuous daily improvement.
- CONFLICT RESOLUTION: A life coach can help you improve your communication skills, empathy, and active listening abilities
- BOUNDARY SETTING: Life coaching can empower you to set boundaries in your relationship with yourself and others.
- CLARITY: A life coach employs various tools and techniques to help you realise what you truly want from life and find a greater sense of purpose and meaning by defining your values, recognising your strengths and limitations while exploring your desires and aspirations for your life.
- PROBLEM-SOLVING: Life coaching helps you identify obstacles that are preventing you from achieving your goals and brainstorm solutions to resolve these issues.
- PRODUCTIVITY: A life coach can help you realise how to use your time more impactfully and efficiently.
- LIMITING BELIEFS: Life coaching helps challenge, counteract, and reframe specific beliefs obstructing your progress.
- MINDFULNESS: A life coach teaches you mindfulness techniques to assist you in staying and finding joy in the present moment as opposed to obsessing over the past or future.
The Limitations of Life Coaching
Life coaching is a process, meaning you cannot expect immediate results. A life coach can help you make plans, address issues, and work toward achieving your goals, but all these things take time. Therefore, it is important to set both short-term and long-term goals.
Not all life coaches are created equal. They don’t all take the same approach to a problem, meaning what you can expect to get out of the process correlates to the type of relationship you have with your life coach. Thus, you need to choose a life coach who is compatible with your personality and problem-solving approach.
Life coaches are not allowed to diagnose or treat mental health conditions. If clients require clinical support, they should seek out psychiatrists and psychologists.
The effectiveness of life coaching depends heavily on the client’s willingness to actively participate, take responsibility for their actions, and commit to implementing changes.
How Does Life Coaching Work?
Many clients seek life coaching for guidance in navigating a significant life change, for example, starting a new job. However, clients may also seek life coaching simply for help in building a happier, more fulfilling life.
A life coach helps you clarify your purpose, set your goals, identify the obstacles holding you back, and come up with strategies and techniques for overcoming each obstacle. These strategies and techniques target your unique skills, strengths, and talents, thereby providing you the support you need to achieve sustainable change and significant growth.
You can expect to explore specific goals you have for the future. A good coach will recognise when you get stuck, assist you in connecting to your motivation and regaining your momentum.
The main benefit of working with a life coach is the accountability provided by the life coach, enabling clients to achieve their goals more quickly and efficiently than they would if working on their own.
Each session should leave you feeling empowered and inspired.
Fees and Rates
As I am still in training to become a life coach, I am not yet taking on any clients seeking life coaching.
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You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep Spring from coming.
Pablo Neruda
Interested in Receiving Life Coaching?
Send an email to thebloomingpractice@gmail.com or a WhatsApp message to +27 71 342 9810 to make an appointment with me or ask any questions.
I will respond in between seeing clients during the following South African business hours (GMT +2):
- Monday: 08h30 – 19h00 (excluding 10h30 to 13h00)
- Tuesday: 08h30 – 19h00 (excluding 10h30 to 13h00)
- Wednesday: 08h30 – 19h00 (excluding 10h30 to 13h00)
- Thursday: 08h30 – 19h00 (excluding 10h30 to 13h00)
- Friday: Closed
- Saturday: Closed
- Sunday: 09h00 – 13h30
In case of an emergency, go to your nearest police station or to the emergency room of your nearest hospital.
Excited to hear from you!
The Blooming Practice 