Life Coaching is good for your health
By Marlon B.Nolan
Life Coaching is good for your health
Life Coaching is a growing phenomenon and, as an industry, is starting to take off with the British people. That is great news for people like me, who offer a service as a Life-Coach. Although Life Coaching is a relatively new discipline, ‘coaching’ per se has had positive effects on many areas of our lives, including business & sport, for a few more decades.
Today, more and more Training & Development Managers are successfully persuading their organisations to use Coaching to support individual progress in the work place.
Does Life Coaching differ from Business Coaching?
Coaching at work is often referred to as Executive or Business Coaching.
To ascertain how Life-Coaching differs from in-house Business coaching is a difficult quest. It’s the difference between the theory and the reality. In essence, Business Coaching may employ the same techniques of Life Coaching, but may have a tendency to offer advice. If this is the case, it takes the form of a mentoring approach, where experienced members of the business, ‘coach’ less experienced employees, often offering direct advice.
The offering of advice to coachees at work can be seen as a ‘directive’ approach; the temptation to ‘tell’ the coachee what will be the best way forward rather than allowing the coachee to explore their own options. In comparison, Life Coaching would rely solely, or predominantly, on encouraging the coachee to ‘own’ their way forward.
Also, Business Coaching fundamentally focuses on work-performance. Life Coaching would prefer to explore the client’s wider life, even if the coachee’s specific issue is about work. This proves a bigger challenge for Business coaches because a discussion on anything bordering an employee’s personal life circumstances would prove difficult due to confidentiality reasons.
With the in-house coach, the coachee has the dilemma of disclosing a personal issue to help overcome a barrier, but runs the risk of showing a perceived weakness to a colleague. This may impact on the coachee’s perception of achieving promotion, for example.
Life Coaching can also distinguish itself further from Business Coaching in terms of where it coaches. Employing Coaching at work is great but often the Coach may turn out to be your Line Manager. A life Coach is separate from the work place, overcoming confidentiality concerns and encouraging a more open discussion. This is important, as performance issues at work may need to be approached from a wider life perspective, as indicated above. For example, to work on becoming a more effective listener can’t suddenly kick-in when you open the door of your office. It needs to be a part of you as a whole. In other words, it would be something the coachee would embrace fully in all parts of their lives in order for any change to be effective.
Of course, organisations are thinking up new ways to enhance the effect and use of in-house coaches, and reducing the risk of the effect of line-managers coaching colleagues. Subsequently, some have resorted to using coaches from totally different areas of the organisation that have no direct link to the coachee’s department. In my opinion, this is a better option for all the reasons stipulated above, but not as effective as using an external Coach. And, moreover, an external Life Coach.
Is Life Coaching a ‘fad’ or ‘inspiration’?
As well as the benefits of coaching at work (and in Sport), Life Coaching is a growing phenomena and proving rather effective in helping individuals improve personal performance and growth. As a result, more and more Britons are using Life-Coaches. We are living in the age of a new millennium. A time and place when and where spiritual and personal growth & development is taken seriously. We are all in the business of creating our own opportunities and successes that make us feel alive – a fresh perspective on our self and self-confidence.
However, there are still people who aren’t fully aware of Life-Coaching or have already generated a negative picture of this service.
The feedback I’ve received over the years regarding the scepticism of Life Coaching can be more hype than fact. Based on the views I’ve received recently from members of my network forum, there are a lot of sceptical views of Life Coaching primarily because they feel its unfounded American ‘razzmatazz’ without any substance.
Essentially, the sceptics believe Life Coaching is another fad; a phase we’re going through because the USA is embracing the trend. In truth, Life Coaching is alive and well in most of the developed world. Some of the best and pioneering research into Life Coaching is coming from Australia; Dr Anthony Grant, no less.
But, scepticism is always rife when faced with progress. For example, the banks told Sahar & Bobby Hashemi, (the successful creators of Coffee Republic), that ‘we are a nation of tea drinkers and coffee will never take off here’. The banks dismissed the Hashemi’s idea of a coffee shop as a ‘fad’ – it will never take off. Today, Coffee Republic is Britain’s original coffee shop and one of its most successful. And many thousands of us have benefited from this ‘fad’, and millions more will continue to benefit from this ‘fad’, despite being a nation of tea drinkers.
The International Coaching Federation (ICF) is the world body that accredits Life-Coaches and its members are growing all the time. This rapidly growing industry therefore does have a regulatory body in the ICF, well set out competencies for its members to aspire to, ethical guidelines of practice, and very rigorous, ‘hands-on’ training routes.
Life-coaches themselves, bring different styles of coaching to their clients, but many share the same core approach. A Life-Coach is serious about the clients’ intentions, and purposeful about getting results. A good Life-Coach will even give you a proverbial ‘kick up the arse’ if you are not achieving. This is important to know because often Life-Coaching is mistaken for the US ‘let’s-be-positive today’ approaches, (‘Let me hear you say “yeaah” – types’). Of course, it’s part of the plan, but its not about saying; ‘I am the greatest’, or ‘I am a positive person’ twenty times then punching the air like a mad man. (In my opinion, affirmations don’t work, anyway) It’s more constructive than that.
Being life-coached is a business that takes a full interest in getting results, fast. It’s about taking realistic responsibility for what you want, and how you’re going to get it. Life Coaching is for everyone, from parents who have raised a family for 16 year who now want to achieve something new, to successful CEO’s who simply want more success in their corporate lives.
Effectively, Life-Coaching is about learning and achieving tangible results. Based on real British grit and determination. Life Coaching is about getting up, and ‘getting on with it’. Taking purposeful action.
Taking on the critics
Another source of criticism I’ve come across is from Counsellors or Psychotherapists. These criticisms attack Life Coaching as a discipline that’s ‘easy to learn’, ‘ignorant about the power of the unconscious’, ‘most advice is useless’, ‘expensive’, and ‘people are beginning to think life coaching is a substitute for genuine depth personal growth work’.
It’s important to tackle these issues head on. First, I recognise the role and service Counselling has in the lives of people who use them. They are essential and should be valued. Life Coaching, however, distinctively has a different market. Typically, Life Coaches deal with people who have non-clinical issues. It’s best practise on my part to advise people to seek specialist help if I believe it’s needed. For example, I would advise a prospective client, who had depression, to seek a specialist. Life Coaching can help people with non-clinical issues to improve their personal performances in all aspect of their lives.
Many Life Coaches undertake full training and accreditation, often, in addition to their existing depth of education & experience. Life Coach training is a demanding path. To argue that it’s ‘easy to learn’ is, of course, a subjective argument. However, it implies that you don’t need much training to be a Life Coach. Qualifications aside, coaching, like counselling, requires extensive personal development & training with an onus on ongoing reflection to help harness the skills and ability to coach effectively.
Life Coaching is not trying to be a Psychotherapy service. To claim Life Coaching is ‘ignorant about the power of the unconscious’ is fruitless. If a client requires overcoming fear of making a presentation, it’s fruitless encouraging the client to spend good money exploring their unconscious, other than their belief system, and possibly their self-image. Essentially, Life Coaching is about ‘Learning’. A coach is in a position to explore habits learnt in the past, help the client un-learn them, and manage the process to learn new, positive habits.
Moreover, ‘most advice is useless’, is an irrelevant point for Life Coaching. Life Coaching is not based on advice, essentially. I’m not saying it goes totally without a helpful suggestion here or there. Only, it wouldn’t be coaching if it were advice-led. It would be mentoring. For clients to own and accept changes in their thoughts and behaviours it’s essential they discover their own solutions, not for it to be given to them.
In light of some members of the Counselling / Psychotherapy profession, in my network forum, criticising the role and credibility of Life Coaching, I offer an extract of the research conducted by Coach Psychologist, Dr Anthony Grant, from Sydney University, based on the following hypothesis:
‘Whether the theories and techniques utilised in counselling and clinical psychology for the treatment of dysfunctionality are applicable to non-clinical coaching populations who seek to enhance life experience’
Dr Grant stipulates; ‘Given the stigma sometimes associated with participation in psychotherapy can act as a barrier to individuals who would benefit from therapeutic help, life coaching, which is not overtly seen to be a psychotherapeutic intervention, prove to be an acceptable & effective methodology for enhancing life experience and reducing anxiety, stress, and depression in normal or sub-clinical populations’.
Whether you believe Life Coaching is ‘expensive’ is a personal judgement. To accuse the industry itself of having an inherent fault of being expensive is nonsense. What is expensive to you? If you could have the one desire or dream you’ve always wanted, how much would you pay? I would Coach for free – because I find it intrinsically rewarding. Fortunately, I believe I’m worth the value I charge and I believe clients value their desire for progress in their lives.
Life Coaching is not a substitute for ‘personal growth work’. It is essentially that – personal growth, development, and progress. It is well placed to achieve these qualities, and it does. Again, Dr Grant, mentioned above, supports this point in his research by claiming; ‘The study provided empirical evidence that a life coaching program can facilitate goal attainment, improve mental health, and enhance quality of life’.
Are Life Coaches well trained?
One of the key debates I’m contending at the moment is the training Life Coaches undertake to be a Life Coach. As mentioned earlier, Life Coaching as an industry is starting to become more established and standardised. However, on the one hand, Life Coaching is getting poor press from commentators who observe that ‘anyone is claiming to be a Life Coach’. This implies that it requires no qualifications and there are no governing bodies to assess good practise.
In response, I cannot deny if there are people out there who have suddenly decided they are a life coach because somebody told them they had great listening skills. What I can say is that there is an accreditation body called the International Coaching Federation, (ICF). The ICF are a global accreditation body that has clear, detailed criteria of competencies that they believe, if fulfilled, qualifies an individual to coach others. Life Coaches can work directly with ICF or with a number of ‘Schools’ that offer courses that match onto these competencies. In addition, all the Life Coaches I have come into contact with have appropriate & specific coaching qualifications from reputable UK colleges & schools.
As a result, a fully qualified Life Coach, could spend up to 3 / 4 years training to achieve these competencies, demonstrating their ability to coach with over 700 hours of evidence. At the same time, the trainee is offered Life Coaching to help explore his or her own development on an ongoing basis. I am working toward accreditation via the NLP route. That’s on top of 2 years qualifications I already hold in Coaching, plus 7 years training and in-house coaching experience, and a degree in Psychology. In total, I would of completed 5 / 6 years evidence-based assessment toward Life Coaching accreditation.
I don’t mention these qualifications to impress you, but to impress upon you the depth of ability that is assessed before finally being accredited. I could of done a Medical degree in that time.
In conclusion, Life Coaching is about results!
This all leads to my point that Life Coaching is a rigorous, structured, and purposeful industry and service. Life coaching is no-nonsense. It’s not ‘wishy-washy’. It’s not ‘razzmatazz’. It’s not ‘gung-ho’. It’s not the ‘fad’ from the USA that some people are afraid may knock on their door and take over their lives; it’s global and developing all the time. And, all those who practise as a Life Coach should follow suit and continue to develop themselves and their knowledge of an industry enhancing the lives of millions.
The next time you hear or read about a Life-Coach. Remind yourself that this is a reflection that individuals in our society believe they deserve progress and development in their lives. Progress in our society is healthy. So, do the right thing call a Life coach, let them know you care.
Marlon Nolan is a Life-Coach and founder of Hummingbird Life-Coaching. He can be found at www.hummingbirdlifecoaching.com, or contacted on: 0870 243 2094.
Source:
www.pr.mg.edu.au : “The Psychology of Coaching” – Fiona Crawford
Marlon B.Nolan, Bsc(HONS)Psych, Cert.Coaching, Dip.Coaching
Life Coach - HummingbirdLifeCoaching
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