I define working as a life coach as being a personal trainer for people’s emotions; helping clients see how they can access something they want in life, a dream to fulfil or maybe a new career.
If you are struggling to make a change, coaching can help raise your self-awareness and understanding for change in certain behaviours. Sessions can involve reflection which can help gain greater self-awareness and often an insight that had not been seen previously. This will allow clients to focus attention and give them space to understand how to move forward to develop clarity, direction and focus. To ensure progress is being made, coaching often focuses on goal-setting. You will typically be encouraged to create a list of action points following a session so you know what steps are needed to keep moving forward.
Mentoring can also help discover motivation, helping you to identify why and what is your lack of motivation by introducing clear goal and target settings through the intervention of tasks. Just having this encouragement along with the increased self-awareness that naturally takes place during the coaching process can be incredibly powerful.
If you can resonate with these and are wishing to attain a goal and re-establish your values, coaching can provide the support that can help you ascertain your needs and desired outcome. The clinic uses inspirational and interactive techniques while challenging you to overcome the obstacles that are holding you back and prevents you accessing a path to fulfilment.
So what is holding you back when you set goals? If you would like to make a change in your life, supportive coaching can help you.
The Holistic approach looks at the person as a whole and their clients’ whole lives; from their physical fitness to the state of their social lives which in order is to help them achieve a peaceful equilibrium. By looking at all elements of the client’s life is helping them find ways to maintain balance.
The holistic foundation considers that to address one issue, all issues surrounding it or connected to it in any way must also be addressed because in essence a network of inter-connectedness has a cause and everything has an effect; so when we change one aspect of our lives, all others invariably shift too.
Holistic coaching is beneficial for those needing to address work and life balance issues as well as lifestyle factors which are often associated with health and stress levels. Within this style of coaching, mentoring can also support you with other issues associated with healthy living, such as weight management, career development, relationship issues and stress management.
Within a devised action plan and by providing you with the tools this can help guide you to focus on improving your quality of life and achieve your goals and encourages:
- a better understanding of how our actions affect the world
- greater sense of purpose
- a healthier body
- a calmer disposition
- greater satisfaction from the small things in life
The mindset approach helps the client to uncover any limiting beliefs, blocks, behaviours or patterns of thinking that may be holding them back.
The focus is entirely on your inner thoughts, behavioural patterns, and self-beliefs and with the support of re-framing techniques such as NLP or CBT, this will help to remove any blocks and replace such beliefs with something that will better serve you and your goals. The initial stage to changing any negative or limiting beliefs involves the client building awareness around these which is the first step to changing them.
Through this approach, once a client has overcome and learned what is holding them back and stopping any changes in their life, this gives the client a basis to work from to reach a specific goal or goals which can be supported with solution focused coaching.
Solution-focused coaching is concerned with what a client’s end goal is wanting to achieve, so setting clear goals and focusing on the solutions is considered. This approach is beneficial especially for those people trying to develop themselves personally as it encourages self-evaluation.
Clients will experience exploratory questions about their aspirations and goal settings so they can visualise and clarify what it is they really want and how they will get there, as well as what happens once they achieve their goal.
This approach helps encourage:
- Introspection
- self-evaluation
- clear goal setting
- a richer understanding of one’s own unique path in life
The therapeutic approach is used to help people overcome a wide variety of issues, ranging from fears and phobias to stage fright, as well as challenging existing perceptions you may have about past mistakes, events, or failures. Many use NLP to help overcome limiting thoughts and beliefs, reduce stress and anxiety levels, as well as to inspire motivation in their life.
Its foundation considers how we experience our world, gained from the neurological processes that govern our five senses: taste, touch, smell, sight and sound. Additionally, how we make sense of these experiences through a set of filters, including language, as the language we use can also affect the way we experience things.
Although this field is wide and varied, the therapeutic benefit that we are interested in is the ability to learn techniques that change our emotional state. So imagine you are feeling pretty anxious and you are able to change your state to calm and relaxed in a matter of moments? How useful would that be?
Using NLP challenges some of the assumptions and beliefs that we hold, so for example, if something goes wrong in a particular set of circumstances does that mean that the same thing will happen the next time we are faced with those same circumstances? Regardless of what happens to a person during their life, it is the way they perceive the situation that affects the experience and influences their thoughts, feelings, self talk and images. For example, two different people at the same event will come out with a different experience. Whether we are aware of it or not, every event in our lives impacts our future in some way. This may be our beliefs, behaviours, reactions or the decisions we make, but each one will make a mark on our future.
Therefore, NLP has become a favoured alternative as its technique focuses on the future rather than encouraging you to unearth past memories or experiences. It works to explore future possibilities and solutions, adding opportunities and widening perceptions, rather than dwelling on the negatives. Altering the use of language, a person can expand the limits of themselves as they can begin to change the way they think and their perception of the world.
This model helps to improve motivational and goal development by encouraging proactive behaviour, confidence and motivation. A client’s desired attributes can be developed through this model’s unique goal setting that will improve a clients performance and unlock their potential. The process will involve the client to explore awareness of their beliefs, standards, aspirations, possibilities, decisions and actions in planning ahead towards a goal and desired outcome.
The Nature Elements: Theory of Personality considers strengths and weaknesses
When we consider characteristic traits of the natural elements in relation to personalities, we explore how the elements present a fresh perspective to concerns and positive outcomes within the dynamics of relationships and situations.
Transformational Connection of the Nature Elements: Transformational Connection is an insightful and intuitive framework to work with; where the client and life coach consider personal attributes of their nature element alignments. Exploring the dynamics of the nature elements is advantageous as it helps shape a better relationship between a client and life coach which aids and strengthens a client’s resolve to their concerns. Within sessions of transformational connection therapy, I will work with you to see which of the nature elements you align to. This is very empowering as you gain an awareness of your natural element alignment and can relate to your attributional strengths with a self understanding of your weaknesses.
These sessions are great for building better and stronger relationships in your personal life and associating these principles of nature to others you are in conflict with. Understanding your own nature element and how it resonates with others provides a new perspective and outcome as you can learn to align with them.
Guided affective imagery is a quick and dynamic process beneficial for goal and aspiration achievement. This psychotherapeutic technique helps a client develop a deeper self-knowledge while being guided through a relaxation process that allows the client to develop their own associated feelings about themselves and their personality as they perceive their aspirations and goals.
Performance and confidence enhancement sessions are beneficial and supportive with those needing a mentor regarding topics such as public speaking, drama and sports settings. This in essence supports those with feelings of fear, expectation and panic-like symptoms; such feelings which can be associated with those unwanted fundamental beliefs. Interactive re-framing and confidence enhanced techniques through hypnosis and NLP can help those people who need supportive inspiration within their domain setting such as actors, pianists, drama & performers working in a legal court as well as individual and team sport activities.
