Life Coaching is profoundly different from consulting, mentoring, advice, therapy, or counselling.

The coaching process addresses specific personal projects, business successes, general conditions and transitions in the client’s personal life, relationships or profession by;

Examining what is going on right now, Discovering what your obstacles or challenges might be, and Choosing a course of action to make your life be what you want it to be.

Coaching involves a partnership designed to facilitate change in a client’s own thinking.

Coaching also requires effective two way communication and dialogue within a professional and personal / person centred approach.

INDIVIDUALS & COMPANIES

In short anyone and everyone can!

The aims of coaching are to help you to clarify your ambitions, assist you to set compelling and achievable goals, help to develop clear action plans and keep you motivated.

Clarifying ambitions helps you to have a focus and a direction therefore enabling you to develop your own personal life plan.

By assisting you to set compelling and achievable goals it enables you to break down the bigger picture into specific manageable goals, again providing a clear focus to developing.

By developing a clear action plan it empowers you, the client to make positive changes within your own thinking and life choices.

The role of a life coach is to enable and support people in order to move forward in there life to achieve what they want to achieve and reach where they want to reach.

The role involves me the life coach being practical and facilitating a forward looking way to enable an individual to gain more clarity on what the individual likes/dislikes and what they can do to enable change.

My role as a life coach provides a confidential, non – judgemental, impartial and totally person centred / personal support structure, enabling you to achieve their maximum potential.

Coaching also requires;

• Effective two way communication and dialogue.
• Observation of performance, followed by constructive feedback.
• An investment in helping others succeed
• A focus on performance and achieving results
• Courage to address difficult issues

The coaching role also helps the client to clarify their ambitions and identify strengths they already have. They can develop empowering beliefs, create new strengths and build upon them for stronger foundations for a better life.

The coach helps the client through;

• Helping the client to understand what it is they want to achieve
• By setting goals which are realistic and which help the client to achieve their higher ambitions
• By helping them to believe they can achieve their goals and ambitions

By guiding them how they can achieve their desires and by encouraging them to go out and do it for themselves.

The client will learn how to;

• Generate their own questions
• Find their own answers
• Correct their own behaviour

• Face to face sessions
• Email / Internet

My approach as a life coach adopts a different and flexible approach where the people and their personalities are of paramount importance.

Changes are sought at a psychological level within individuals.

This approach often enables an individual or a company to achieve change faster and with longer lasting results.

Sessions normally last 45-60 minutes.

Some people have 1 session, others have a course of sessions between 4-8 approximately.

Others see life coaching as a longer term asset and lower the frequency of visits as their goals and progress become clearer.

It usually takes between a month to 6 weeks to start achieving desired results, though you the client, will often feel the benefit from sessions almost immediately.

It is unusual for the coaching process to last more than 6 months but some clients can have a series of coaching relationships each one building on what was achieved before.

Coaching may also involve assignments for you which enhance your learning in some way; a reflective essay, keeping a diary or journal, joining a club etc.

You need to be prepared to be actively involved!

Counselling, therapy, consultancy, and mentoring are all methods of personal development but coaching does differ form each of these in the following ways.

Counselling and therapy are more focused on overcoming problems and tend to look at 1 aspect and work solely on producing improvements in that area whereas coaching focuses on an aspect of persons life but take into account the whole person’s performance within that area.

Coaching is also focused on the present and the future whereas counselling and therapy tend to look at the past.

Mentoring is frequently confused with coaching but the 2 processes are different. A mentor is generally there to help someone learn a particular task or skill. The mentor will have lots of experience in a particular area and help the client to learn / develop in that area.

Unlike mentoring, coaching is not instructional, it does not aim to develop new vocational skills or provide answers through teachings from an expert.

Coaching does however enable the client to learn new skills by enabling the client to find their own way.

Consultancy is normally prevalent in the work place, it usually involves gathering information, data, analysing functions and quantifying requirements to support proposals designed to create operational or structural change.

A life coach adopts a different approach where the people and their personalities are of paramount importance and changes are sought at a psychological level within individuals. This approach often enables a company to achieve change faster and with longer lasting results.