What is Life Coaching?

Why is Life Coaching the second fastest growing sector in the world? If you want to be in the driving seat of your life and not simply a passenger, then hiring a life coach can greatly improve your chances of success.

‘A collaborative, solution-focused, results orientated and systematic process in which the coach facilitates the enhancement of work performance, life experience, self-directed learning and personal growth of the coachee.’  Association for Coaching

“Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximise their personal and professional potential” International Coaching Federation

If you wanted to become better at any sport, you would get yourself a coach. All the world’s top athletes have a coach. Their coach isn’t on the pitch with them and may never have played the sport professionally. That’s because, more important is their ability to observe the players game; to notice what could be strengthened for better results, or what range of techniques and tactics that might accelerate the players growth. By watching from the sides, the coach offers the player a different perspective, holding up a mirror to help the player become more aware of their ‘blind-spots’. We all have them.

Mindset & Neural Plasticity

A great coach also knows that there’s an “inner game of tennis”[i] that needs to be mastered. There’s a link between what we think – ’mindset’ (psychology) – and our performance (behaviour). The human brain has evolved over thousands of years and our unconscious instincts continue to be dominated by the survival strategies of our primitive brain stem. The neuroscientists confirm that our brain is literally sculpted by our experiences, with negative, challenging, threatening experiences being prioritised. We all live with this unconscious, negative bias. We learn from our experiences – i.e. our sensory feedback loops – and new neural pathways are formed. This “neural plasticity” reflects our learnt experience of how “the world”, our world, works. Our unconscious priority is to learn about what threatens us so we can stay safe by avoiding any repeat of a negative experience in the future. The human brain does not give the same importance to experiences with less drama. This is a wonderful ability to have but our life script needs to stay up-to-date, or we are guided by the internal scripts we developed as a child.  When we meet new life challenges, whether wanted or not, we struggle to meet them because the familiar is more known and appears ‘safer’ than change or stepping into the unknown. Life coaching with Hypnotherapy bypasses our internal critic to reprogram these subconscious interferences & limitations. Cognitive behaviour techniques convert our negative bias into a positive mindset.

A Life Coach is like a Performance Coach

Life coaching has developed from performance coaching[ii] and offers an opportunity to reset and upgrade your mindset[iii], with the guidance of the unbiased coach whose goal is to enable you to grow and live the best version of yourself. “Neural plasticity” continues throughout our lives – an old dog can learn new tricks! – so we can literally rewire our brain at any age. Life coaching with NLP focuses on prioritising and re-establishing the strategies that are known to be associated with success. NLP is all about living with a positive mindset that can deliver the results you truly want.

Life coaching is effective when the client is committed to taking action. Every coaching session has a forwards focus and concludes with agreed actions or small steps towards the client’s goals that arise from the collaborative assessment of what might most effectively enable the client to grow in their desired direction. We can only get a different outcome by doing something different.

Hypnotherapy Life Coaching

Hypnotherapy life coaching offers the added benefit of fully engaging the imaginative powers of your subconscious mind, to identify what you truly desire and to motivate you to take the steps that will get you there. Research shows that visually rehearsed actions can improve performance as much as actual practice does. Hypnotherapy harnesses this fact. In a trance state, it is much easier to fully associate with intense visualisations of any desired experience. Doing so, activates the same neural pathways that living this experience would. In this way, we can (literally) reshape our minds, open up new possibilities and practice new behaviours until they become familiar.

Are you living the life that you truly most want?

Navigating Life Transitions

Michelle* was a senior manager with a long and satisfying public service career. She was greatly valued and appreciated as a strategist and leader. She knew how to energise teams and departments to adapt effectively to changing budgets and work practices. She had previous experience of coaching for her career, and now she again wanted support. This time to transition from a life centred on work, to one focused fully on herself and her family. The previous year, out of the fog of the menopause, her body sent her a loud warning that all was not well. Something needed to change. She listened – changed her diet, reduced her stress and got the ‘all clear’ – but she knew she wanted to make her health & well-being a central priority in her life, in a way that her career had never allowed.

When we met, Michelle was still working and her colleagues were doing their best to persuade her to stay, with lucrative offers of interesting, part-time roles. She felt complimented but knew in her heart that she wanted a ‘clean break’ so that she could shed her work persona – she recognised how being a successful leader depended on her donning a mask and putting others before herself. She described her colleagues as her ‘family’ but now she wanted to prioritise her own health and to deepen her connections to her partner, sons and grandchildren. She wanted time to enjoy activities that her career had not left time for.

And yet – she felt uncertain about taking this leap into the unknown.

Michelle’s professional experience of change management meant that she was aware of how difficult it can be to change our day-to-day habits, even when we know we want to. She knew that to ensure success with her life project, the support and experience of a life coach would enable her to achieve this transition. She signed up to the ‘vibrant change’ program on this website. At first she was uncertain about how she would like to live if she no longer had her career to focus on. She used hypnotherapy to tap into her subconscious and to develop a clear and compelling picture of the life she wanted to now create.

Over the next three months, Michelle stayed focused on the healthy outcome that she wanted to achieve for herself. She found she was able to end her career in the way that she wanted – honoring her commitment to herself while supporting her colleagues to plan effectively for her departure. One of the most striking details of Michelle’s final session with me was how much younger she looked than in her first session – she had a beaming smile on her face, a mischievous twinkle in her eye and spontaneous laughter punctuated her stories of all the new, rich experiences she was now having and planning.

Vibrant Change

The Vibrant Change program is designed to enable you to get wherever you want to get to, faster than you could on your own.

What might you spend on a spa retreat or a weekend away in the sunshine, to give yourself a nourishing break? How long do the benefits last after you get home?

Life coaching is an investment in your well-being that can bring you benefits that will last for a life time.

[*name changed to protect client privacy]

[i] ‘The Inner game of Tennis: The Ultimate Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance.’ (1972) by W. Timothy Gallway

[ii] ‘Coaching for Performance’ by Sir John Whitmore, (2017 5th edition) Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London.Boston

‘The NLP Coach’ by Ian McDermott & Wendy Jago, (2000) Piatkus publishing

‘Your Inner Coach’ by Ian McDermott & Wendy Jago, (2003) Piatkus publishing

[iii] ‘Neuroscience for Coaches’ (2nd edition, 2017) by Amy Brann. Kogan Page ltd, London.