What is life coaching? by Clair MacKenzie Life Coach
What is life coaching?
Life coaching is a process that helps you chose and achieve the life that you want. Life coaching helps you to ‘feel better’, whether that’s in your ‘day-to-day’, or helping you through a major life change, or helping you to achieve a major goal.
Whether your goal is to lose weight, improve your health, discover your life purpose, get a promotion, address a troubling relationship, the chances are that ultimately you want to feel better. To have more peace, happiness, and joy your life. And health coaching can help with all of this.
What makes a good life coach?
A good life coach will work with you to discover and understand your true motivation. Oftentimes we believe that losing all our excess weight, getting that promotion at work, or being a better parent will make us happy – but then when we achieve it, we still feel lacking.
Frequently it is about mindset. It’s just as much about managing your thoughts and feelings, then it is achieving what you think you desire. A good life coach will work through this with you in parallel to helping to take the actions required to get the results that you want.
“Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don’t have to like it… it’s just easier if you do.”
― Byron Katie
A good life coach knows how to ask the right questions. Your brain always wants to answer questions and a good life coach knows just what questions to ask to help your brain find answers that will be valuable to you.
A good life coach understands that you hold the ultimate wisdom on what is right for you, and they will help you to tap into that wisdom.
Who is life coaching for?
Life coaching is for you because life coaching is for everyone. Whereas life coaching was once seen as something that business leaders, sporting professionals, entrepreneurs and CEOs invested in because they wanted to take their lives, careers, or businesses to the next level, today it is as valuable in helping a ‘stay at home Mum’ to feel better, as it is to the next Fortune 500 leader. We all deserve to feel good about ourselves and our lives, to be happy and to have joy.
“Of all the things we can spend our money on, mental health needs to be at the top of our list… Not our car, our house, holiday, or entertainment.
Our mental health determines how we feel, what we create, and how we perceive the world around us.”
― Brooke Castillo, The Life Coach School
How can life coaching help you feel better?
There are so many ways in which a life coach can help you improve your life and feel better.
If your focus is weight loss or health improvement a life coach will help you introduce daily habits through changing how you think and feel, helping you to stay motivated and take massive action. Whatever the plan or program it’s often the mindset that you need help with. We often know what we should do but find it difficult to ‘stay-on-track’ and follow through. This is as true for getting that promotion at work, as it is for following a healthy life regime.
A life coach helps you do what’s required to move forward and deal with the parts of your brain that cause self-doubt or self-sabotage.
“One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.”
― Tony Robbins
Does life coaching work?
A 2016 survey by the International Coach Federation found that 99% of people who worked with a life coach were satisfied with the results and 96% of people would work with a life coach again. Furthermore, they specifically noticed the following improvements:
- 80% improved their self-confidence
- 73% improved their relationships
- 70% improved their productivity
- 67% improved their work-life balance
What’s the difference between life coaching and therapy?
Life coaching is for you if you are a bit stuck, want to make a change in your life, or want to live life being the best version of yourself and want the support of a coach to do so.
Life coaching does not address clinical depression, deep anxiety, or mental illnesses.
Also, a life coach will focus mostly on looking toward your future, rather than digging deep into your past, although they may help you address what story you tell about your past in the present day and evaluate with you whether that story is helping or hindering how you feel and live your life now.
Another key difference between life coaches and therapists is their focus. A therapist tends to be more focused on a certain problem you are dealing with and what got you there in the first place, whereas a life coach, is going to take a more holistic view of your life.
My experience of life coaching
Whilst on parental leave with my daughter I studied for a Nutritional Therapy Diploma. A portion of that course was a Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) Practitioner course.
When my parental leave ended I took the decision to return to work and put my studies on hold. Working full time with a toddler and baby didn’t leave much time for study! Whilst it was disappointing not to be able to continue, the benefits of the NLP part of the course were immense.
Applying the principles to my own life I had the most phenomenal year. I moved to a new part of the country, got promoted at work, had a hip replacement, renovated a house, lost three stone, and dealt with my Father being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (we found out that it was an incorrect diagnosis three months later – but for three months it was very real).
I then got caught up in life, didn’t continue practicing what I had learned and reverted to my old habits and ways of thinking and doing things.
That was until I discovered The Life Coach school pod cast last year. Much of Brooke Castillo’s teaching overlapped with what I had learned on my NLP course, and again I loved what I learned. In fact, I loved it so much that a few weeks later I signed up as a scholar of The Life Coach School and enquired about becoming a Certified Life Coach and Certified Weight Loss Coach. I couldn’t initially get on the program and so, being the impatient person that I can sometimes be, found another program with The Health Coach Institute and completed the Health Coach Institute course and am now an HCI Certified Health Coach and an HCI Certified Life Coach.
Since then I have been accepted onto The Life Coach School Life Coach Certification and Weight Loss Coach certification programs and will complete my certifications for these by the end of this year.
Finding life coaching again has helped me to lose weight and get healthier, make progress in my professional life and, according to my husband and children, be nicer to be around at home. Also, through sharing what I have learned, my close family members have made significant improvements in their own health. My husband who is type I diabetic and survived a stroke last year is healthier and slimmer than he has been in more than a decade. Similarly, both my parents have lost weight and my father has been able to reduce his medication for his type 2 diabetes.
Read more about my struggle with losing weight and my weight loss journey.
If you would like to try life coaching, please email me at [email protected] and we can set up a free taster session.
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