Be Only You

I often get asked what the difference between a life coach and a therapist is. Typically my answer will include something like “ a therapist helps you process your past and a life coach empowers you to develop your future”.

Life Coaching: the activity of helping clients decide what they want in their lives and how to achieve it.

Cambridge Dictionary

It is important to note that a life coach is not there to provide you with advice per se. Their expertise lies in helping you connect to your inner self, your desires, your wants and supports you in developing an action plan to work towards those dreams and goals (whatever they may be). A life coach can come in many forms and you can work with a life coach on all sorts of topics or aspects of your life like your career, relationships, passions etc. It is also worth spending the time to understand the distinction between life coaching versus therapy or counselling. At a very high level your life coach is enabling you to create the future you desire while your therapist/counsellor provides mechanisms for you to process your past in order to address your present in terms of your behaviour, habits etc. Still unsure? Please don’t let this stop you starting the process because a good coach will walk through this with you anyway.

My Experience With Life Coaching

Like every type of coach, a life coach will have their own unique way of working or style with their clients e.g. methods, in-person or virtual etc. So I will caveat that my experience has been all through virtual means.

Sidenote: at the start of every calendar year, I like to set myself some medium to long term goals including any habits that I plan to implement or try out in that year, some stick, some don’t and that is the beauty of experimenting with myself. I plan to cover goal setting towards the end of the year and perhaps share some suggested templates for people to try out (do let me know what you think might help you!). 

Back in 2022, I gave myself a pretty heavy list of goals divided into the different aspects of my life e.g. body, mind, work, new skills etc. Within the “mind” bucket I wrote down “get a life/career coach”. I had been reading more and more about the power of such coaching. At this stage, I had never undergone any professional therapy so I didn’t really know what to expect. I did have some experience in business coaching years previously although that was very much people management and advice oriented.  After a particularly difficult year at work (2021) which could be described as a toxic cocktail of the pandemic hangover and undiagnosed burn-out, I believe the universe proactively pushed my life coach into my life. I am grateful that my life coach was already within my personal network and so I was very lucky in terms of having an existing relationship to lean on. They reached out just before Christmas 2021 and after some thought, I decided to take the plunge. I can tell you I have never looked back and I wish everyone had access to a life coach and that I had started the process a hell of a lot earlier.

Before The Introduction Call

So naturally I was apprehensive and nervous ahead of my introduction call despite knowing my life coach already. Will this work? Am I ready for life coaching? What happens if I am not good at it? Will there be awkward silences? Like with all relationships, it is important that you have a first meeting to assess your rapport, energy matching and understand the expectations from both parties. If your coach does not provide an intro call then I would recommend trying someone else. Furthermore, it is an opportunity to give your coach a sense of the areas that you want to cover e.g. career, relationships, health, personal growth etc.

Be careful of the judgmental voice in your head versus your intuition giving you messages on how to proceed. Don’t let your fear stop you from trying new things or being vulnerable. Remember your success in this process is exactly your life coach’s intention. So in this way you are both rowing towards the same thing!

The First Session

Depending on the coach, the first session could last somewhere between 30-45 minutes so that the coach can share more on their coaching style, manage your expectations on what can be covered and usual logistical stuff of cost, cancellation periods, recommended number of sessions etc. I started out with a block of 6 sessions weekly, moving to once a month and now I tend to have 1-2 sessions per quarter. This is highly personal for everyone although I do recommend the weekly approach to start off with so that you can keep the momentum up. You should also note, that you are typically requested to complete a questionnaire (you might receive this before the session) including sharing your next of kin details and the details of your general practitioner. As I said, your life coach is not your therapist although they do have a duty of care if they become worried about your state of mind and need to alert someone close to you to help. 

A Typical Session

Again, different life coaches will use all sorts of techniques although the best sessions that I have had are usually when I am talking ~90% of the time. Think of this as a safe space to speak all your thoughts out loud and I can promise you this can feel so liberating (yes awkward at first but you will get used to it). You don’t realise how restrictive your own head can be because your ego is constantly talking back against you. Also a good life coach will listen intently to you and provide prompts to ensure you are sharing all that you need to at that point in time. 

Typical sequence of a session (again this is highly personal to the coach and coachee)

• Opening: small talk + general update on life/topic being discussed
• Main discussion: Enquiry into desired topic with you building out a refined statement of “what it is that you want”. Depending on how the session goes, you may go deeper into this by double clicking your “wants” statement even further and unpicking what you think is holding you back.
  • Remember you are in the driving seat and the life coach is guiding you through with prompts
• Closing: wrapping up how you are feeling, anything else to share and discussion on another session etc

My Top Tips For You

1. Get yourself a dedicated journal to take notes before and during sessions (make sure to date them!).
   • Top tip: I don’t tend to do much prep for these sessions because really the work is done in the session itself although the night before a session, I jot down a few key points as follows;
     • Summary of the previous session: I read my notes to get a sense of what was discussed the last time and importantly take a moment to appreciate the work I did
     • Since we last spoke: some general updates related to the topic we discuss or anything that may be related
     • What I would like to focus on today: share some thoughts on aspects I want to discuss to use this as a starting point. 
2. Trust the process & the coach
   • Allow your mind to flow, allow the tangents, through this you are peeling back the onion layers.
   • The answers are already within you so it will take time to peel back those layers to find them and remember the life coach is not going to tell you the answers
3. Show yourself compassion and kindness
   • Stop yourself in your tracks if you hear “I should of, could of” etc and replace with “ I am proud of the work I did” or “I am proud of starting the process of life coaching” or whatever other compliment you can give yourself
   • Allow yourself to feel excited about the process and the unknown destination (it is the journey that is more important)
4. Expect bumps in the road
   • Like life, not all sessions are going to feel as energising or empowering as others because frankly that is life and we are all human
   • Some sessions you will find yourself contradicting a previous version of you especially as you uncover more and more but this is a sure sign that you are doing the work on your personal growth 🙂

Finally, So Where Should I Start?

You might be very fortunate to have health insurance that provides a related service or perhaps your company benefits include coaching. Otherwise do some research through the usual channels and social media making sure to check the usual reviews. Be careful of people taking all your money upfront without an intro call!

If you are not in a position to do so or frankly not in the head space to speak to someone perhaps some of the following might help get you started:

• Dedicate some reflection time for yourself during the day/week with a journal
  • Ask yourself what it is that you want and put the timer on your phone for 5 minutes and don’t stop writing
  • Imagine you had a magic wand 🧙‍♀️and could wish for absolutely anything, don’t hold yourself back!
• Keep doing this until you are able to separate your wants into specific goals e.g. I want to improve my fitness and my health so that I can become fitter and feeling better in myself
  • What do you need to do to make time for fitness?
    • Get up an hour earlier because you know you won’t go to the gym after a long day at work
  • Or for your health, you know you feel better when you meditate everyday, so you decide that before your coffee in the mornings, you dedicate 10 mins to that

So my advice is to keep working towards the best version of yourself ✨, this is highly personal to you and while it is so hard not to compare yourself to others, notice when your monkey mind starts “while he/she does this better than me”. It doesn’t matter who does what but you and you alone. Your personal growth journey is like building a muscle, it takes time and a lifelong process!

Comparison is the thief of joy

Theodore Roosevelt

If any of this content inspired you or you have any feedback I would love to hear in the comments below.

Much love ♥