Imagine a partnership that is 100% focused on you. Someone who regularly asks what you need, what you want and what your dreams are! A person who is intentional in their listening; making sure to correctly hear what’s currently going on in your life, without judging you, while aiming to understand your potential and where challenges may lie to achieving what you want. A person who truthfully tells you if you’re overselling yourself or when you are underestimating and thereby limiting yourself. An external set of eyes, that notices if you’re tending towards self-sabotage or need a reminder to encourage you to stay focused on where you are keen to get to.
While it isn’t meant to be a permanent situation or replace the primary relationships in your life, most, if not all of us would benefit from this kind of a partnership at various points in our lives.
What do Life Coaches Do?
Life Coaches aim to help people maximise their potential by tapping into the advantages of each person’s unique skills and gifts. Life coaching assists people to improve their day-to-day life, from relationships to careers, by setting goals and coming up with strategies to reach them. A life coach is trained to ask the right questions and thereby help you get to the essence of what you really desire.
During life coaching sessions they will hold you accountable, provide encouragement and help keep you focused on what you want to achieve. They will also help you analyse your situation so that you are able to identify potential complications or things that could hinder your progress. Thereafter they will work with you to come up with a plan of action that’s tailored to best help you achieve your goals.
A life coach is not a therapist. Instead, they are more like a partner in your journey towards achieving something and an external source of encouragement that holds you accountable.
Is Life Coaching Worth it?
Life coaching can help you more easily maximise your potential and achieve what you want to within your life. A life coach is a trained set of extra eyes, which you employ to look into your life, to help you spot potential strengths as well as possible obstacles then strategize accordingly. This can be a very successful way of helping you better ensure that you are happier and overall more contented with life.
Why Life Coaching Works
Life coaching works because it is a solution focused approach to personal growth. Research shows that by working alongside someone else who helps inspire, encourage and focus you, you are more likely to achieve your goals than if left to your own devices.
Life coaches do this by helping you to:
- Identify and define a vision for your life with personalised goals
- Create personalised goal strategies
- Achieve your goals
- Better create a life/work balance
- Identify possible obstacles, including beliefs that limit you
- Articulate what your core beliefs and values are
- Improve your communication skills
- Foster new and improve existing relationships
- Grow your network
- Better manage transitions and change
Who Benefits from Life Coaching?
Anyone and everyone can benefit from life coaching. You could be a stay-at-home mom, a creative type, an executive, a manager, a student or an entrepreneur. It’s not about what you do in life, life coaching is about what you want out of life.
If you are interested in achieving a specific goal, formulating a vision and creating a strategy to live it or want to improve your output by exploring and tapping into your potential, then hiring a life coach to walk alongside you would be well worth it. Especially if you want to stay focused, encouraged and be held accountable – all the things which would assist you to get to where you want to at a quicker pace.
Remember the lessons and strategies learnt during life coaching can be employed successfully across all areas of life. This means that while you may be specifically focused on one area of life, such as your career, you are very likely to see other areas improve too. This is why anyone can benefit from life coaching and most areas of your life could be your focus during a life coaching journey.
Who becomes a Life Coach?
Life coaches are people who want to see others live their best lives by achieving their goals and dreams. They are at heart “a people’s person”, who like to see the strengths in others and the positives in life around them. If you have a passion for developing yourself and want to pass this passion on to others, then its quite likely you would be an ideal candidate for a career in life coaching.
10 Questions to Ask Yourself to see if You should be a Life Coach:
Are you:
- Passionate about self-development
- Self-motivated
- Inspiring, enjoy encouraging and helping other people
- Empathetic and can relate well to others
- Wanting to be self employed
- A people’s person with good people skills
- Passionate about working with people
- Curious about how people tick
- Non-judgemental and have an open mind
- Honest and value integrity
Is this is a good description of you and are you interested in becoming a life coach? SACAP offers a range of coaching courses, all accredited by the International Coach Federation (ICF) and aligned with COMENSA. For more information, enquire now.
Life Coach FAQ:
1. Why does life coaching work?
Life coaching works because it’s a solution focused approach to personal growth. Having someone alongside you, who you are accountable to while helping to encourage, inspire and focus you, has been shown to assist in better achieving goals.
2. Is life coaching effective?
Yes, life coaching is an effective way to assist in identifying a personal vision, strategizing on how to make it a reality and putting that strategy into motion within an encouraging, honest and accountable environment.
Who should use a life coach?
Anyone who wants to achieve a specific goal, needs to transition or adjust to changes, improve output or maximise potential would benefit from using a life coach.
4. Who should become a life coach?
A positive people centred person, who is passionate about self-development and making a difference in other’s lives by helping them reach their full potential, has the makings of a life coach.
5. How do you become a life coach?
Ideally you need a coaching accreditation from a certified and reputable organisation. Like those available through SACAP which are internationally recognised and aligned with COMENSA.