What Is Coaching? 

Coaching concentrates on the positive aspects of the human condition to boost overall performance and life satisfaction. Coaching can be a short-term process that incorporates straightforward, solution-focused, and goal-oriented techniques to produce desired results. By highlighting strengths and abilities, coaches and clients collaborate to devise new ways to enhance professional, sports, music, relationship, or other categories of performance, tackle challenges, achieve goals, identify and eliminate destructive habits, and improve the overall quality of life. Coaching often focuses on harnessing personal strengths and identifying vulnerabities or self-sabotaging tendencies allowing clients to access hidden talents, develop new skill sets, and achieve their full potential.

Goals of Coaching

Good coaching should be tailored to the needs of the individual client. It should include flexibility of method in its aim to help clients reach goals, develop new skills, and overcome personal challenges. Under optimal conditions, with the right coach, changes can be long-lasting.

Performance coaching:

The focus of performance coaching is to help individuals at all levels better understand the requirements of their trade and their innate capacities in order to optimize their successes. By identifying current gaps in performance and self-sabotaging tendencies, and determining what it takes to fill those gaps and end self-sabotage, clients are able to develop plans for future success by mining their strengths and practicing to overcome weaknesses.

Career coaching:

In career coaching, coaches help clients identify what they want and need from their careers in order to achieve professional satisfaction. This type of coaching also relies on an objective assessment of a client’s strengths and weaknesses. Coaches can then help clients follow through on making the necessary changes to pursue a suitable career and create a work/life balance.

Relationship coaching:

Relationship coaching aims to assist two or more individuals in deciding what they want out of their relationship, and then identify the path to achieve a mutually agreeable outcome. Relationship coaching can be implemented in many types of relationships, including romantic, familial (parent-child, siblings, etc.), professional (business partners), and platonic ones.

Personal/Life coaching:

In life coaching, coaches aim to help clients gain awareness of their personal life goals and priorities. Through this process, clients can assert control over their lives and achieve clarity of mind and a renewed sense of purpose. A coach with a mental health background can help clients learn to better understand their feelings and how those feelings affect their actions and their ability to identify and achieve their goals. Clients can also learn to increase their fulfillment and achieve success by setting actionable goals that are consistent with their values and their current priorities.

It is important to find the right coach: one who will be candid with you about his or her limitations, and one who will not shy away from telling you how you may be getting in your own way and sabotaging your potential.

 Who Can Benefit From Coaching?

Coaching clients are typically ambitious and motivated individuals who want to improve themselves and achieve limited growth in one or several aspects of their lives in a short amount of time. Anyone who wants to maximize their potential should consider coaching as an option. If you are reading this and asking yourself if coaching is a good option for you, there’s a good chance you can benefit from working with a skilled coach.

Ask yourself why you are considering coaching. Some people pursue the help of a coach because they are fearful of facing feelings and dealing with past and present realities that they believe psychotherapy will reveal. If fear of your feelings or a desire to run from your past is driving your decision to seek coaching, psychotherapy may be the more beneficial path to pursue.

Every day, all kinds of people benefit from coaching. Entrepreneurs, professional athletes, musicians, trial lawyers, actors, couples, and stay-at-home parents are just a sampling of the diverse populations who can benefit from working with a coach to achieve their goals.

Coaching vs. Psychotherapy

A common misconception about coaching is that it is the same as psychotherapy. However, despite any similarities, there are key differences that should be considered before deciding which service to pursue.

1. Psychotherapists are trained and licensed to treat psychological symptoms and conditions. Life coaches cannot deliver psychotherapy services unless they are licensed by a regulatory board or are working under the license of a board-certified professional.

2. Coaching tends to focus on assessing and correcting the present and improving the future and oftentimes addresses one goal at a time. Coaches and psychotherapists should both aim to help clients identify their future goals and agree upon a plan of action to reach those goals.

3. Coaching services are not typically covered by health insurance policies. This means that it is unlikely you will receive any reimbursement from your health insurer for coaching services you pursue.

4. The services provided in psychotherapy and coaching differ in nature. Coaches who are not also licensed as mental health professionals should not be providing you with a mental health diagnosis, prescribing medication, or treating you for a diagnosable mental health condition.

5. If you are seeking the services of a coach, make sure you familiarize yourself with his or her experience and credentials so that you can obtain the right type of assistance to maximize your likelihood of achieving your goals. If we work together, and I believe you will benefit from a medication evaluation to help you improve, I will refer you to a prescribing psychiatrist to further assess your symptoms and needs.

Choosing the Right Coach

It is important to ensure that you are in the best hands possible to achieve your goals and experience measurable improvement. Choosing a coach who is well-educated in human motivation and behavior and who possesses ample experience working with clients can be the first step in enhancing your quality of life and helping you achieve lasting success. Visit my About Me page to learn how I may be of help to you.

In addition to finding a coach who possesses experience and credentials right for your situation, it is also important to find someone who can provide a personal coaching style and environment that feels right for you. Visit my contact page to inquire about working with me.