I will start by telling you my personal story with coaching, as I think it showcases best when life coaching can bring value to our lives.
After 5 years of living abroad and coming back home (after quitting my job), I’ve found myself very much dreaming of starting my own business. I started to draft some business plans, do some numbers, research the market and the potential of implementing my idea, but what happened was that I couldn’t bring myself to actually make the jump. Meaning to go to the official state office to register my business and start ‘doing’ things. I was stuck, trying to figure out the risks; I was paralyzed with the fear of failure, fear of losing all my savings, not going to make it and ending up hurt and miserable.
After a few months of being idle and obsessing around this idea, I realized this is beyond me and I need help, from someone with more experience that can tell me exactly what to do, step by step. And so, I opened my laptop, I googled ‘business consultants’ in my area and I ended up finding a coach, but I didn’t know that at that time. I thought I was going to a consultant, but instead, I got back so much far. In the first session, he had a 50/50 consulting/coaching session, he helped me with the practical steps of launching a business, but also helped me to unstuck myself by overcoming my fears. The next 5 sessions with the coach were transformative for me, and not only I’ve improved my self-confidence and other important entrepreneurial skills, but I’ve ended up choosing a more suitable career path for me than I’ve initially envisioned.
So, this right here is one of the best-case scenarios about coaching.
Having a relationship – 6 sessions or more – with a person with expertise in one area but also coaching certifications and experience, where they help you get unstuck, move past a barrier you have, develop new skills, get to know yourself better, while feeling supported through the process and feeling safe (read not judged or criticized) to speak your mind is the core of a coaching program.
If you want to tap into your full potential and conquer the obstacles in your path, if you want to be successful in every aspect of your life, if you ever feel the need to share your challenges with someone and find out how to move past them, a coach is the person that can show/coach you in the right direction.
What Does a Life Coach Do?
“Coaches have the ability to view things from afar — in what some call ‘helicopter vision’ — and to shed new light on difficult situations. Often they can act as a sounding board through tough decisions, help sharpen skills, and motivate.”- CFO Magazine
Life coaches focus on assisting their clients with conquering the obstacles of their present life. It is a synergistic relationship based on mutual trust, between two individuals, where the life coach helps the client move forward in the right direction with the help of positive goals.
In today’s fast-paced era, many successful business leaders, executives, entrepreneurs, and CEOs, but also anyone interested in fast-tracking their career or change their life quality overall, take guidance and help from accredited life coaches to advance to the next level in their personal and professional lives.
Coaching is also a key skill for every leader or manager, learning how human motivation works and how to motivate their team, not by telling them, but by helping them find their own answers and solutions while feeling supported and heard.
Coaching as a profession, but also as a leadership skill is already very widespread in North America in all areas of life and career, and also in all developed countries in Western Europe, especially in the corporate world, and I am positive that coaching will be a highly sought after skill in the near future in Eastern Europe also.
“Part consultant, part motivational speaker, part therapist, and part rent-a-friend, coaches work with managers, entrepreneurs, and just plain folks, helping them define and achieve their goals — career, personal, or most often, both.”- Newsweek
A life coach can help you with:
- Personal development
- Finding out who you are: values, motivations, passions, life purpose
- Setting and achieving goals
- Accomplishing your dreams
- Starting and scaling your business
- Achieving Financial Independence
- Balancing personal and professional life
- Managing and finding the ideal career
- Making better life choices
- Taking independent and encouraging life decisions
- So much more
A life coach can help you with building your life from the ground to the sky. Life coaches are trained experts who understand the importance of setting the right goals. They can help you make more money and structure your personal and professional life to achieve higher productivity with less effort.
When to Hire a Life Coach?
It may look like your universe is under your control, until you hit a wall: you start to feel unhappy, you have everything that one might wish for and still, this is not enough, you want a different lifestyle, you realize that who you’ve always wanted to be is so far away, you made or you are about to make a big life change. Suddenly, you are obsessing only in one area of your life, making you feel sad, miserable, anxious or lost.
With the help of a life coach, you are basically setting aside (give yourself permission to stop, reflect, and ask for guidance) some time for yourself, to reflect about what’s going on now in your life, what are your options, which one is the best for you and how to proceed with it while the coach makes sure you are and stay on the right track and keeps you accountable for your progress.
Here are some scenarios where a life coach can guide you towards greatness.
1. You Just Started Your Own Business. You Don’t Know How to Manage It.
Everyone wants to be their own boss. Everyone wants that sweet bliss of career independence where you control your destiny. However, starting a new business and becoming an entrepreneur can be quite challenging.
A life coach can help you ascertain your true potential and set positive and realistic goals for every step of your entrepreneurial journey. Instead of aiming for the moon, your life coach will tell you how to set realistic and achievable goals that are appropriate for your startup. They can help you with a breathing room, and you can focus entirely on your business without overthinking.
2. A Notable Change took place in your life, and You Don’t Know How to Deal with It.
Death, loss of work, shifting, migration, financial losses, divorce. These are all big challenges that have happened to all of us at least once in our lives. All the bad stuff can be like a crosscut shredder shooting your life.
A professional life coach is going to be sympathetic and empathetic! and provide you with a safe place to grieve. Taking the time to grieve completely, however, can reduce the quantity of time you spend in isolation and desperation.
Most of us want to prevent this at all expenses and try to force our way through these moments to end up living for much longer with an undercurrent of resentment and depression. However, a life coach can genuinely turn your life around and help you deal with the tragedy. Boxing up the depression can result in catastrophic explosions later in life.
Your life coach will guide you through your pain, and in case the sessions with them will not prove themselves to bring alienation, they will be the ones to propose undertaking therapy. It may be the case that your excellent coach will support you and offer you reliable tools to move forward to a more peaceful place when you’re prepared.
3. Your Life Has Come to A Halt, and You Don’t Know What to Do.
You may continue to try to enhance your company, work, financial situation, or relationships, but nothing seems to work. Your life has come to a halt, and you are in a ‘rut’.
It may be that your patterns are not supporting your goals. You are clear about where you want to be, but you continue to make self-destructive (unconscious) decisions that keep you tied to your bad habits. You lack the true commitment to really making your dreams a reality and you don’t know how to get on the right track. In the words of John Assaraf, “When you’re interested, you do what’s convenient; when you’re committed, you do whatever it takes.”
The right life coach can help you find out why you’re stuck and why things don’t seem to work the way you want them to. They can assist you in eliminating your obstacles and getting out of your head. With the comprehensive guidance from a life coach, you can move forward with your life.
Then they will assist you to remove these barriers, bust through age-old painful convictions, and come up with a plan to help you get what you want, profoundly.
4. You want to improve your health or change your habits
Like many of us, you may be wondering – how do I break bad habits? You may have a clear vision of what you want your body to look like, and how you want to feel day-to-day, but there’s something holding you back. Whether it’s overeating or choosing to sit around and watch TV and/or series instead of getting to the gym, the greatest roadblock on your journey to get fit is oftentimes yourself.
Changing a habit is never easy – the decision is made with the rational part of the brain (prefrontal cortex), but habits live in a different part of the brain which is very resistant to change. It’s not just willpower – and who thinks this is in for a treat. Only by assessing all of the factors involved in the change and making mindful steps towards your goal, you can increase your chances of changing forever a habit. A coach can help you do just that, keep you accountable, motivate you and keep your focus on the goal, even though there will be relapses.
5. Your Life Is Taking a Beautiful Turn, but You Are Getting Cold Feet.
So everything in your life is taking a beautiful turn. You are getting married, promoted, or starting a new life with someone. Congratulations. However, such radical shifts can be frightening and disorienting.
Essentially you let go of the “old” you and take on a brand-new identity— but you’re not yet there! It can be excruciating and scary to let go of what you know. Especially if you feel that you should be happy, but in reality, you aren’t so pleased.
An excellent life coach can assist you in navigating this enormous shift and helping you in moving forward in a much more pleasant and healthier manner. They can tell you how to move on from what you were to what you should be.
6. You Just Moved Abroad and You Are Confused with Everything.
Moving to a new house or location is among the most stressful events in human life. You need a calming presence to deal with the new environment.
Your life coach can teach you how to deal with the new country and how to make new friends. Leaving your entire life behind cannot be easy. A brilliant life coach will help you settle into the new location and adapt to the new environment.
7. You Want to Achieve Your Dream, But You Don’t Know How.
When I was a teenager, all I wanted was to become a writer and weave fantasies into a beautifully well-written story. Well, the only problem was that I never knew where to begin.
Your life coach will help chart out a perfect plan to achieve your dream step by step. Instead of being a crazy procrastinator, your life coach will turn you into a go-getter. Achieve more with effective, laid-out, and productive strategies.
Thank you for reading so far. If you can relate to any of these situations and feel that you might beneficiate from coaching, just write to me (on FB chat, WhatsApp +40723350537) and we’ll take it from there. The first session is always free and you can decide after if you still want to work together.
This situations are not relevant to you? No problem at all, they don’t need to be. Coaching is not only for the above examples, but these are just the most common use cases. Tell me your story and we’ll pick it up from there.