Does your life need a coach?

CNN is running an article about life coaches.
(CNN) -- "Where do you see yourself in five or 10 years?"

It's one of those questions many job-seekers dread during an interview, but it can be daunting to answer on a personal level as well. Amid all your responsibilities, activities and projects, it's sometimes hard to see the big picture and easy to become overwhelmed or feel like you're lacking direction.

That's where a life coach can come in.

"If you are frustrated with an aspect of your life, not sure how to stop making the same choices you keep making or just want to have more happiness, peace of mind and passion -- life coaching can do that for you," says Rhonda Britten, founder of the Fearless Living Institute.

Life coaches can specialize in areas like relationships, careers or personal growth. They promise to motivate, offer support when clients need a boost in confidence and help them decide which direction to take.

"In a perfect world, everyone could figure this out for him or herself, but we live in such a complicated time ... that most of us need all the help we can get," says life coach Libby Gill.
I often joke about becoming a life coach or motivational speaker. It is not that I have complete disdain for these people, but I sometimes find it hard to take them seriously. And it is not that I feel like I am the perfect example of someone who hasn't any challenges. Anyone who reads the blog for any length of time knows that.

But, I sometimes wonder if some people choose the path of least resistance, if they abdicate responsibility by hiring one a coach. Maybe that is too simplistic. Perhaps I am not digging deep enough. There is merit in finding someone to help you as a mentor. Maybe what I am poking fun at it is the idea of hiring someone to kick your ass into gear.

Because it seems to me that if you cannot find the motivation within yourself it doesn't matter what you do or whom you hire. Change comes from internal forces.

Personally my life coach is this blog. I tend to lay out my thoughts here and then determine how to proceed. You know what I want to do. I want to clone myself so that I can find time to do more, to learn more, to experience more. Maybe I can find a life coach who knows how to make that happen.

3 comments:

rabbi neil fleischmann said...

Nice post. I like the idea of a life coach. Also like the idea of blog as life coach.

Mynde Mayfield said...

I like very much the conversation you have opened up in this post. Of course, being a Life Coach myself, I'd like to offer a tid bit of my perspective around what people *think* coaching is vs. the reality of what is actually is.

Coaching is actually not about hiring someone to kick your own ass... even I had that perception when I hired my first coach. Truth is, we are already doing a fine job of that and the "kicking our own ass" part might actually be the pattern that Rhonda Britten refers to in her quote "how to stop making the same choices"... here the choice is to beat up on ourselves or be even harder on ourselves when we don't get the results we desire.

My experience of coaching was eye-opening and the antithesis of hiring my own personal butt-kicker. In the space of the coaching experience, I actually woke up to exactly how disempowering it was to kick my own ass and now have a new set of tools and skills from which to draw on when that familiar pattern emerges.

We've all got our own hammers to pull out and use on ourselves. So, of course, it wouldn't make sense to hire someone to do it with us/for us. But it would make sense to hire someone to help me make better, more empowering choices that eventually lead me to recognizing when I've got my hammer out and how to put it away.

Jack Steiner said...

Also like the idea of blog as life coach.

It seems to work for me. It really is a place in which I work stuff out.

But it would make sense to hire someone to help me make better, more empowering choices that eventually lead me to recognizing when I've got my hammer out and how to put it away.

I can appreciate that and see how some people might benefit from it.

Not Quite Abandoned

I didn't think it had been as many months away from here as it has clearly been. I was certain I had updated this place in December and ...