Chapters
- 01. What Is the Goal of Life Coaching?
- 02. What Are the Benefits of Life Coaching?
- 03. What Problems Do Life Coaches Solve?
- 04. How Frequent Should Life Coaching Sessions Be?
- 05. How Often Do Life Coaches Usually Meet with Their Clients?
- 06. How Long Should Life Coaching Sessions Be?
- 07. How Are Life Coaching Sessions Structured?
If you've been thinking about working with a life coach or even looking at life coaches, you'll need to consider how often you see your life coach.
It's a tough question to answer, but it's also a really important one to think about because life coaches tend to charge by the hour so every hour you spend with them will cost you money.
It's also an important question to answer because if you see your life coach too often, you'll render your sessions ineffective and costly, but if you see them too infrequently, you won't enjoy the benefits of working with a life coach. In either case, you'll end up wasting your money.
Before you can work out how often you need to see a life coach, you must understand exactly what life coaches do, what their goals are, the benefits you should expect to get from your sessions, and exactly how and when these sessions take place.
What Is the Goal of Life Coaching?
With life coaching, the clue is in the name. Just as a coach helps athletes perform better by helping them improve their fitness, work on their technique for their given sport, and even control their diet, a life coach will help you perform better in certain areas of your professional and personal life and teach you techniques to help you achieve your goals more easily.
Life, like sports, is also a mental game, and life coaching can help you with motivation, picking yourself back up when you fail, and ensuring that you remain driven in the pursuit of your goals and ambitions.
It's at this point that we have to be very clear that life coaches are not medical professionals and are certainly not mental health professionals. For issues with mental health, seek help from licensed medical professionals such as counselors and therapists. While life coaches can certainly help with certain aspects of mental health, your first point of contact should always be a medical professional.
Make sure you know exactly what life coaches should and shouldn't do before working with one.
What Are the Benefits of Life Coaching?
Life coaching is mainly about working out what your goals are, establishing achievable goals, working out how to achieve said goals, and, ultimately, achieving your goals. Through life coaching, you'll learn skills, strategies, and techniques to better organize your goals and be more focused on them.
The benefits of life coaching will leak into other aspects of your life, too. Regardless of which aspect of your life you're working on, the techniques and approaches that life coaches teach you can be used in a variety of different settings.
Having a clear idea of what you want and a better understanding of your ambitions will help both in your professional and personal life and it never hurts to know how to stay motivated in the face of adversity.
Not only will you have a better idea of what your goals are, but you'll also learn more about yourself as accountability is a big part of life coaching. You'll be encouraged to think a lot about what you can and can't do and what parts of your life are under your control and what parts of your life aren't.
What Problems Do Life Coaches Solve?
Life coaches don't technically "solve" any problems: they give their clients the necessary guidance, techniques, and approaches to solve the problems themselves.
In the same way that sports coaches don't take to the field and it's the athlete that performs, you'll technically solve your own problems with the help of your life coach. However, there are lots of different areas in which life coaches can help you.
Life coaches can help if you need help finding direction in your life. If you're unsure what you want out of life, life coaches can help you analyze your ambitions and goals and work together on a plan of achievable goals to help you lead a more satisfying life.
This direction also extends to your professional life. A lot of life coaches deal with customers looking to change careers or further their current careers. Again, if you're dissatisfied with your professional life, a life coach can't make your job any less annoying, but they can help you work out ways to change that. If your career is at a crossroads, a life coach could be the crossing guard.
They can also help with aspects of your personal life and help you to set clear and achievable goals for living a better life outside of work. The same is true for your work-life balance, something many of us struggle with.
There are lots of different types of life coaches and also lots of different ways to find life coaches.
How Frequent Should Life Coaching Sessions Be?
How often your life coaching sessions will depend on you, your goals, and the optimum frequency with which you should meet your life coach.
If most of your goals are long-term and you're unlikely to reap the benefits of these goals for a while, it's not going to be worthwhile meeting with your life coach every week and having nothing to update them on.
However, if you're working on a lot of smaller and high-frequency goals, then weekly meetings could be incredibly beneficial, especially if a lot of your goals deal with changing harmful habits, etc. After all, habit-forming is something that takes place over a few weeks and it can be useful to check in with your life coach to readjust your goals and objectives.
How Often Do Life Coaches Usually Meet with Their Clients?
Again, the frequency of your sessions should be decided between you and your life coach. In terms of scheduling, it can be common for life coaches to meet with clients weekly. After all, they need to earn money and also schedule the time they spend with their clients and since everyone pretty much works on a weekly schedule, weekly scheduling often makes the most sense.
However, life coaches also tend to be quite flexible with their sessions, but if you have a very rigid schedule, you won't be able to expect your life coach to just drop everything to see you if you only schedule a session with them once every quarter.
Different life coaches do scheduling differently so you should discuss this with them as you don't want to start working with a life coach just to find that your schedules don't work.
How Long Should Life Coaching Sessions Be?
Life coaching sessions, as with many other things, tend to be based on the hour. It's very common for sessions to be between 45 minutes and an hour. This is a good amount of time because it fits into most people's schedules. A very short session isn't usually worth taking the time to attend, but longer sessions run the risk of being overwhelming or ineffective.
Even if you have a lot to go through, it's probably better to have two sessions in a week than a really long session. If you're really getting into things, a two-hour session could be absolutely exhausting!
An hour-long session is a sweet spot for most life coaches, but some may do longer 90-minute sessions for more complex goals and ambitions. As always, discuss this with potential life coaches and decide which format will work best for both of you.
How Are Life Coaching Sessions Structured?
Within a typical hour-long life coaching session, there are four main parts: preparation, analysis, coaching, and action.
You'll need to prepare for each life coaching session. You can think of this like “homework” and while you mightn't need to write anything down, you might be tasked with bringing some ideas to the session or even just thinking about what you want to discuss.
After that, you and your life coach will analyze and discuss things. This often takes place as an open dialog or with exercises. You'll work out what you want and look to prioritize your goals and ambitions.
Once you've worked out what you want, this is where your coach will likely provide their input and teach you techniques, and approaches, and basically do what they're there to do. This is part of the session where you'll learn what to do and how to do it.
Finally, you'll set your goals, be given more “homework” or things to do or achieve before the next session, and leave with more clarity on the next steps to take on achieving your goals. After your first session, the final parts of every session will also be part of your preparation for the next session.
After a few sessions and once you've got the hang of life coaching, you and your coach can always adjust the frequency, length, and structure of your sessions. Life coaches tend to be quite flexible since each of their customers will be different and have different goals and needs.
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