To put it simply, a life coach is somebody who helps people better manage their lives. In the same way that every person is different, every life coach is different.
Whether or not life coaching is right for you depends on the kind of person you are, what aspects of your life you need help with, and whether the benefits you'll get from life coaching are worth the cost of the service itself.
Here, we're going to see exactly what life coaches do, what they can help with, how they could help you, and whether or not it's something that you should consider doing.
What Problems Can Life Coaches Solve?
Life coaches can work with clients on a range of problems they have with their lives, but you should always remember that complex problems rarely have a simple solution and you can't and shouldn't expect your life coach to ever fix a single problem.
Just as sporting coaches can help athletes prepare for an event through training, nutrition, tactics, and technique, it's still the athlete that has to perform on the day.
The same is true of life coaches. While they can certainly provide you with advice, strategies, guidance, and expertise, you need to recognize that when you work with a life coach, they'll look to provide you with what you need to achieve your own personal goals, not achieve them for you, which is why preparation is essential in life coaching.
That said, they tend to focus mostly on providing clients with guidance in their professional lives, personal lives, and their lives in a broader sense, as their name would suggest.
Is Life Coaching Better than Counseling?
If you've been reading this and thinking, this sounds a lot like counseling or therapy, you'd be right. The overall goal of counselors, therapists, and life coaches is to improve our lives and there are certainly some areas that overlap in these roles.
However, whether one is better than another really depends on what your goals are. We need to be very clear that life coaching is not a replacement for mental health professionals when it comes to your mental health and anyone struggling with mental health issues should seek help from mental health professionals first.
However, there are things that life coaching classes online could help you with more than a therapist. For example, a therapist is only concerned with your own mental well-being and really isn't there to provide you with career advice.
Life coaches tend to focus much more on work and career and are excellent for those who don't necessarily have clinical mental health concerns, but rather are looking to find more engaging and rewarding ways to live their life. Make sure you know exactly what life coaches should and shouldn't do when you work with them.
Can Life Coaches Help with Stress?
Life coaches can absolutely help with stress, but again, remember that for serious and clinical cases of stress, mental health professionals are out there.
If you're already working with a therapist, for example, and you've established which areas of your life are causing you stress, you could definitely enlist the help of a life coach to help you plan and strategize how to improve in those areas.
Some life coaches can provide techniques and strategies for dealing with stress and may even use techniques found in therapy and used by mental health professionals. Just remember that they probably shouldn't be your first option if your only goal is dealing with stress.
Can Life Coaches Help with Anxiety?
Much like stress, life coaches can help teach clients how to deal with anxiety. Again, and we can't stress this enough, they're not a replacement for mental health professionals.
Life coaches are more about dealing with your general goals in life and teaching you how to achieve them. They can and do deal with certain aspects of mental health, but they're not mental health professionals outright.
Achieving your general goals and managing your life better can improve stress and anxiety, but mental health is complex and life coaches can neither be expected to (nor should they promise to) cure or treat stress and anxiety.
Can they help with it? Absolutely, but not on their own.
Do Life Coaches Really Help?
Some people believe that life coaches are liars or cheats. As in any field, there are bad actors out there who over-promise and under-deliver, but there are also those who offer exactly the services they promise.
Life coaching can help and is particularly useful for those feeling a bit lost in life. Life coaching is really about helping people work out what they want out of life and giving them the tools and techniques to get it.
This doesn't mean that working with a life coach will make you a millionaire, make you instantly happy, or any of the other things you'll see from so-called miracle coaches. Life coaches work the same way as any other coach.
If what you're looking for is what life coaches offer, then they can really help. However, if you're looking for a quick and easy fix, you should know that there's no such thing and you should be wary of life coaches promising them.
Can Life Coaching Change Your Life?
The whole point of life coaching is to change your life so the answer to this is a resounding “yes”. You just need to know that while life coaching can help you to make big changes in your life, it's really about making small but important changes.
Life coaching tends to focus on managing your behavior and the behaviors you can control. To go back to the sporting comparison, it's about learning how to control the game as much as you can, rather than making that buzzer-beating shot.
Life coaching should help you change your life in ways that help you achieve your goals. Do not hesitate to take a look at a professional life coach near me, they can help you with online or face-to-face lessons.
How Long Should You Have a Life Coach?
As everybody is different, the ideal amount of time to have a life coach will differ. Everybody should have a life coach for as long as they need one.
Remember that you should only have a life coach when you need one and when they're helping you. If either of these conditions ceases to be true, then you should stop working with your life coach.
The general time frame for life coaching should depend on your goals. If you're looking for life coaching for short-term goals, then you should only need your life coach for this time.
For bigger goals, you may need life coaching for a while. Just remember that while you can't expect your life coach to miraculously change your life for the better, you also need to carefully think about how much they're helping you. Ff you decide to look for a life coach, Superprof makes finding the perfect personal coach for you a breeze. Just click life coaches near me to begin.
How Often Should You See a Life Coach?
This is another question that greatly depends on your goals. Generally, you should think about how frequently you need help with your life goals and how much your life coach can really help you.
If you're working with big career goals and plans that are likely to take a while, you probably won't need to see a life coach weekly. Some people, for example, may check in with a life coach every quarter. Others may see their life coach once a week, especially if their goals are more pressing or granular.
There's also the financial consideration so you'll also need to come up with a schedule that you can afford and also provides value for money.
Think carefully about how often you should see your life coach.
What Should a Life Coach Not Do For You?
Despite areas of overlap, a life coach is not a therapist. We're not saying this to disparage the work that life coaches do, but it's an important point that can be forgotten, especially when people are looking for help with their mental health.
Mental health professionals and therapists are trained, licensed, and able to deal with mental health such as anxiety, depression, trauma, etc. While life coaching can help with these in some ways (much like how diet and exercise also can), seeing a therapist is always preferred.
For this reason, a life coach cannot charge their services to health insurance. They are neither healthcare professionals nor providers. They cannot promise to diagnose or treat mental health concerns.
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How Do I Find a Good Life Coach?
The best way to find a good life coach is by carefully vetting potential life coaches and seeing what their other clients had to say about them.
Any life coach could say how good they are, but what you really want to see is what their clients had to say about them. While no results can be guaranteed, you do want to look for coaching classes online with tutors who regularly offer services that their customers are happy with and customers who regularly achieve their goals thanks to the help of their life coach.
Just remember that if you do work with a life coach and they stop working for you, you can always switch to another. Good life coaching classes nyc, or elsewhere, with a coach who will be confident enough in their services that they shouldn't fear or feel threatened by losing you to another life coach.
They should also understand that everybody's different and a life coach that works for one person mightn't necessarily work for another.
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