An Introduction to Coaching

Life coaching is one of those things that, once you know what it is and how it benefits your life, you love it.

Unfortunately, most people don’t really understand what coaching is.

I will attempt to explain it by starting with what it is NOT.

Coaching is not mentoring. Mentorship is a collaborative process where a more skilled person teaches someone else how to get what they have. It’s very results focused. It’s taking the exact steps that worked for someone else, and applying them to your life. I have sometimes offered mentoring and some of my programs do involve mentoring. I mean, why reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to?

Coaching is also not counseling. Counseling is giving advice. I do not tell people what to do, and I’ll tell you why. I do not know what you should do. I do not know your life as deeply as you do, and I do not need to tell you what to do in order for you to do what is right. As a coach, my job is to help you understand and come to your own conclusions so YOU can live your life, not me.

Coaching isn’t therapy. I am not a doctor. If you are non-functioning and/or you are dealing with trauma, coaching is not for you…yet. Therapy tends to focus on the past and healing, whereas coaching focuses on the future and growth.

Coaching is not a quick fix. The best coaching programs are year-long endeavors. Coaching requires commitment and dedication. It requires effort. People that pay for coaching are in it for the long haul.

Coaching is a place of space to understand the mind, to gain awareness, and to live consciously. I say ‘place of space’ because it can be a one-on-one relationship or it can be in a group or a program.

As your life coach, I hold the space for you to come to your own conclusions. This is the best place to take action from. I can tell you what to do, I can mentor you, and it will change your life. But if I coach you and you have your own insights and understandings, the impact will be more powerful because the solution came from YOUR brain, and the actions you take from your own brain will always have you more willing to take them and the results of those actions will last longer.

Imagine what it would be like to have a deep conversation every week about what’s going on in your brain and in your life and how your brain is interpreting your world. When you have those conversations every week, you will see your patterns. And if you don’t, I will point them out to you. But you want to have the conversations because that is how your patterns are revealed. If you don’t see them, you won’t change your behavior.

If you don’t change your behavior, NOTHING changes. In fact, the issues you’re dealing with might become even more of a problem.

This is why the weight or the eating habits stay the same or get worse. The spending stays the same or gets worse—even if you have more income. If you don’t change your behavior, the amount of money or weight you have will stay the same.

Coaching is about awareness and doing what it takes to create long term change.

One of my favorite life coaches summed it up perfectly. He said:

“Coaching is like offering a boring solution to a problem that will take you a long time to solve and will require you to deal with yourself in a way you haven’t before, and incur mental and emotional difficulty that you have previously avoided, but will ultimately pay off.”

Most people will read that and kind of want to crawl out of their skin. Coaching isn’t right for them at this time.

But some people will read that and give a loud resounding YES because they get it.

The boring solution is conversations. We’re going to talk every week for a year, and you will feel better and change your life. The conversations we have are not the same as you’d have in therapy. It’s not therapy, remember. You have to experience it to understand it, and that’s why I offer a free consultation.

It will take a long time to solve. Chances are, you’ve been thinking the way you’ve been thinking for your entire life. I’m in my 40’s so when I talk to my life coach, I bring her 45 years worth of thoughts that haven’t served me in the areas of my life I want to change. That’s a lot of undoing, and it’s so worth it.

It will require you to deal with yourself in a way you haven’t before. In coaching, everything is on the table. There are no secrets. This doesn’t mean you have to tell me everything, it means you have to tell yourself everything. You have to listen to yourself. Watch yourself. Observe yourself and your actions, how you interact with your life. When something bothers you, you face it. When feelings come up, you feel them. The good and the bad.

And most people aren’t doing this. They’re going through life on autopilot. They’re going through the motions. Getting through the day. There is a lot of avoiding things by escaping. This looks like shopping, listening to music, eating, meditating, consuming, consuming, consuming. And it’s not that that way of living is wrong. It’s just that it is unconscious.

AND, most people have really good reasons for escaping. Their life is hard. They are going through difficult things. I get it. Life is challenging, but I think it is more challenging to avoid the discomfort because it always comes back. It always resurfaces. And most of the avoidance behaviors have negative consequences that end up making people more unhappy than they would be if they would’ve dealt with their emotions from the beginning.

Coaching will have you dealing with yourself like you never have before. It will have you changing your mind and taking new actions and responsibilities to better your life.

You will incur mental and emotional difficulty that you have previously avoided. It’s just like going to the gym to lift weights. If you want to increase your strength, you must incur physical difficulty. If you want to be emotionally resilient, if you want to have a clean mind, you have to effort your way there. If I could go in and erase your mind and input a new program that served you in your life, I would. But you wouldn’t want me to do that. You want your memories. You want to preserve your life. But you also want to feel better and take more action.

And the way to do that is by managing your mind and your emotions. It means thinking before you speak. It means being conscious when you walk in your front door and deciding to not go straight to the candy bowl or the chips for comfort. It means not picking up your phone until after you’ve completed your tasks for the day and you’ve done your workout. It means following your food plan no matter what.

These things are difficult to do, but they are doable. Especially when you have a life coach who is invested in your life as much as you are.

It’s easy to think it doesn’t matter. And maybe it doesn’t. But my goal is to feel better and I don’t feel better when I eat the chips. I feel gross. I don’t like the version of me that eats chips. I like the version of me who sees the reason behind the desire to eat the chips and addresses that reason and solves that problem. Because that version of me is calm and grounded and has time and energy for her family.

It will ultimately pay off. You have to believe it will. Because if you don’t believe it, it can never happen. You get what you tell yourself repeatedly. Most clients come to me thinking thoughts that don’t serve them. Things like: I never get what I want. I have to do everything. Nothing ever works out for me. Nobody listens to me. I’m the only one who cares. There’s not enough money. There’s not enough time. I just don’t have the energy. I’m so tired all the time. I’m exhausted. I can’t…

These thoughts are painful. It doesn’t matter if a thought is true or not. If it’s not bringing you closer to the life you want to be living, you have to stop thinking it. But sometimes we do want to think painful thoughts. Sometimes the pain brings us closer to our loved ones. So it’s not about only finding the thougths that make you feel good.

It’s about finding the thoughts that are aligned with the life you want to create, and thinking them all. the. time. The words you say direct your life.

This is what coaching is. It’s you and me, and your brain. It’s conversations over a long period of time.

I want to help you live on purpose so you can have a life that brings you joy and fulfillment. A life you feel content living.

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