Life Coaching
Life coaching and why some are more successful than others
More and more people are setting up a business offering life coaching. It seems life coaching has become big business in the world and everybody wants to cash in. So why do some coaches make it and others dont? What sets one life coach apart from another life coach? To answer that question, lets first define what a life coach is to understand how to stand out from the crowd.
Here is an extract from Wikipedia
Life coaching is a practice that helps people identify and achieve personal goals. Life coaches assist clients by using a variety of tools and techniques. Life coaching draws inspiration from disciplines such as sociology, psychology, positive adult development and career counseling. Specialty life coaches may have degrees in psychological counseling, hypnosis, dream analysis, marketing and other areas relevant to providing guidance. However, they are not necessarily therapists or consultants; psychological intervention and business analysis may be outside the scope of some coaches work.
Contemporary life coaching can be traced to the teachings of Benjamin Karter, a college football coach turned motivational speaker of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Many Life-Coach training schools and programs are available worldwide, providing options (classroom attendance or home study) for the individual who wants to gain a certificate or diploma and paid work in the field of life coaching. Many certificates and a few diploma credential designations are available within the profession.
Critics contend that life coaching is akin to psychotherapy without restrictions, oversight, or regulation. However, the Colorado General Assembly, after holding a hearing on such concerns, asserted that coaching is unlike therapy because it does not focus on examining nor diagnosing the past.
On August 14, 2012, the word Life Coach was listed for the first time in the mainstream Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary.
Life coaching is about your clients success
Interestingly, life coaching, like other coaching is still an unregulated market and there are many people out there calling themselves life coaches, business coaches and all sorts of titles with very little to back it up. There are training courses available that deliver in varying degrees. You see, if you are an auto electrician, then you dont just learn about fixing fuses. You learn about flicker units, wiring and everything else that you will need to be successful in your trade. Same would be true in any profession. You dont want to have a brain surgeon who only managed to scrape though on his final exams to work on your loved ones would you? You want somebody who knows what they are doing and is going to look after your best interests.
So why do some coaches succeed and others fail? I think there are a number of reasons that influence how good you are as a coach. For this article we are only going to focus on your skill level and not other things like marketing etc.
Lets say you somehow got your first life coaching client. Family, friend or somebody you just knew. The very best thing you can do is to help your client succeed in their goal. Surpass their expectations. Deliver on what you promised. Now I dont mean do everything for them. I mean get them to your agreed outcome or goal, the goal that you agreed upon in your first consultation. If it was to help the client stop smoking, then getting them to lose weight may be a nice extra, but that was not the goal. Stop smoking was the goal. That is what you need to deliver on. That is what you will be judged on by them and others.
Now the goals from client to client will be different and that means that a one shoe fits all approach simply will not work. So if all you learnt about coaching was from a book on how to use a model like the GROW model, (or any number of different models) then that simply wont work. You see, getting the client to say what their goal is, what their current reality is, what opportunities they have and what they will do is all well and good. It simply is not the way your clients mind works to get results for every situation or goal. If it was, the chances are they would have stopped smoking or lost the weight they wanted to all by themselves. Your life coaching armory of tactics and techniques needs to be well stocked to deal with different clients with different presenting problems and ways of dealing with life.
Life coaching success is about your skills
So what techniques or training should you have? Well that depends on you and the service you want to offer. If you are e.g. a retired psychiatrist, then your offering may be totally different to a school teacher looking for a change in career. One may want to work with people with anxiety, whilst the other wants to work with kids with learning problems. Your skill level and experiences are different. It also depends on our own beliefs. You see, the client will actualize what you believe to be true. Depending on the coaching course you do, will depend on what techniques you learn, e.g. things like NLP, hypnosis, Timeline Therapy and life coaching. Some schools offer all these certificates, whilst others only offer coaching as a base training and possibly NLP as an extra. Then of course you could then also do these training to simply practitioner or to Master practitioner level. As I mentioned before, also depends on your past experience, if any.
So here you are with that first client and they want to stop smoking. Just working with a typical traditional coaching Model wont work. You have to deal with the underlying problems or reasons why the client is a smoker. I say reasons, because most people live on the effect side of life. Everything that happens to them is an effect that something or somebody else had on them. They have not taken responsibility for the fact that they are smoking and blame it on their parents that smoked, peer pressure or some other reason. NLP may be the right solution to help them to stop smoking, but what about the next person who wants to lose weight. They may be overweight because of something that happened to them in the past. A limiting decision they made about them self and cant change their eating habits until they get rid of that limiting decisions. So in this case Timeline Therapy may be the first step to success. Of course for somebody else, hypnosis may be the right solution, or a combination of all three.
You see, clients are different and so you should be able to draw on an arsenal of experience and techniques to help your clients get the results they want. What is the right solution for the client? Not what is right for you or what fits in with what you know or studied. This can further be expanded on by saying, if you are out of your depth or not equipped to deal with a certain problem, pass the referral to somebody who is. It is what is in the best interest of the client and the client will thank you for it. If the client is a potential threat to themselves or others and you dont have training to deal with the situation, refer them to a psychiatrist.
Make sure you have the training and skills necessary to deal with your clients needs and your life coaching practice will succeed. Do what is right by your client. Be open, honest and willing to change your techniques as the situation demands. Be willing to always learn new skills and expand on your knowledge. As the world changes, the clients problems and demands will change. Man can not long be his own advisor, so most successful coaches go for life coaching themselves.
This and more is what make a successful coach, compared to an unsuccessful coach. The choice is yours. Are you going to be one of the people who have just set a new lifestyle business to coach people, or are you a life coach who wants to make a difference and has the right training to help your clients in the way that they need?
by: Coaching with NLP
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