Is Life-Coaching For Everyone?

Is Life-Coaching For Everyone?

Life – Coaching relatively constitutes a new profession. The first use of the term “coach” in connection with an instructor or trainer arose around 1830 in Oxford University slang for a tutor who “carried” a student through an exam. The word “coaching” thus identified a process used to transport people from where they are to where they want to be. Historically the development of coaching has been influenced by many fields of activity, including adult education, the Human Potential Movement, large-group awareness training (LGAT) groups , leadership studies, personal development, and positive psychology. Professional coaching made its appearance in the mid-1990s.

So to whom is coaching addressed? To answer this, it would be prominent to first respond to the question “What’s the reason and the purpose of coaching existence?” Progress. Human progress,which is determined by domains as technology, energy, space,artificial intelligence and environmentally friendly living. These are determining factors of  humankind’s future because they gradually and constantly contribute to the rise of our life quality levels and their perpetuation as well; that is, once the bar is raised, it keeps on being raised towards one direction: forward. Αlong with these progress factors, coaching plays its own unique role.

But how coaching contributes to human progress? There are four fundamental benefits:

a) Goal setting and Accountability: Setting specific short and long-term goals to achieve, chunking them down into smaller steps as well as having our coach to hold us accountable to our personal vision or commitment and asking us to account for the results of our intended action significantly increase our effectiveness on our goals.In other words, it is quite more likely to achieve our goals when we set an explicit plan and are aware of being accountable to someone else.

b) Self-awareness: Although goal setting and accountability are important elements of coaching, the value of learning more about ourselves,our wants, our being, our vision, our life purpose as well as simply noticing, recognising and expressing our emotions cannot be overlooked. On the contrary, self-awareness could be considered as the core of coaching as it plays the role of a life compass.It will turn you towards the right direction. A direction based on your values and your beliefs.

Besides that, shedding light on ourselves by being present in every moment,every second of our life,experiencing every emotion of ours , can lead us to track and finally overcome our personal challenges and fears that have prevented us from achieving our goals and enjoying ourselves along the way.

c) Consciousness of choices: Being present in our every life moment and making conscious choices is another prominent particle of the coaching entity. Most of our daily actions are driven by our unconscious, our fears and personal limitations.It is making a  conscious choice that incites us to take full responsibility, to take charge of our life, ending up enjoying a more balanced life.

d) Personal development: Following self-awareness and consciousness of our choices, the more we learn about ourselves, the more we grow as persons. Self-development is both the result and the process during our coaching experience. We explore ourselves and make conscious choices along our coaching journey by breaking our comfort zones, taking actions, learning from them and implementing the new knowledge on our daily life. As a result, we change, transformed into the best version of ourselves. But transformation and self-development as personal states derive by the whole process. We grow every day on our coaching pathway. The transformation is simply more apparent at the end of coaching.

ICF(International Coaches Federation) defines coaching as “partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential”. Provoking thoughts, different thoughts which are purely based on our “being”, on our true wants, independent of self-limiting beliefs, stereotypes, ”shoulds” and personal fears, leads us to make conscious choices and take action based on them. And when these actions are consistent, then our mindset changes; hence our attitude and response to the world and circumstances changes. We change.

These four main benefits of coaching  are strongly connected to each other and can expand to all of our life areas– career, time management, finance, personal relationships, social and physical environment, health and well-being, personal growth, spare time and recreation etc – due to the complexity of human nature itself. In other words, we are not one – dimensional but multidimensional beings who long for fulfilment. Fulfilment in their job, health,performance,personal relationships, financial status, in their whole life spectrum; a life full of quality. We,as humans, naturally want more. More time for our family, friends and ourselves, more health and fitness, more financial independence, more fun and pleasure, more balance, more self-awareness, more self-development, more impact on the world, more job satisfaction, more joy, more fulfilment, more of ourselves. Not because we are greedy but due to our high level of awareness of these needs. Thus, we have realised that progress is the way to satisfy them.

So is coaching for everyone? Do we really need coaching? If we do recognise our human need for progressing, for having a life exactly how we want it to be as well as we acknowledge our ability to achieve it, coaching is definitely for everyone.

Therefore, the right questions here are:

a)Do you believe you deserve this life? and

b)Do you want to go more in your life? How far?

Bottom line: first we need to believe we deserve this life. Whether we are going to pursue it or not depends on nobody but ourselves.

Speaking for myself, I strongly believe each human being deserves to enjoy this life; deserves their own version of happiness. Why not you?

To learn more about the coaching benefits for individuals and organisations check a few statistics check Benefits of Working With a Life-Coach (leads to the page of the previous article : ”Benefits of Working With a  Life-Coach”