Life Coaching
Life Coaching is a valuable alternative to traditional counseling for teens and young adults. Many people and even some professionals are confused about the difference between life coaching and counseling. The short answer is, traditional counseling tends to focus more on identifying and processing things from the past that prevent an individual from moving forward in a traditional in-office talk-therapy format.
Life coaching on the other hand tends to focus more on today, moving forward, and puts much less emphasis on the past. Life coaching focuses more on real-time actionable accountability to personal goals that help the individual become the healthiest and strongest version of themselves. Life coaching is a fun alternative to traditional counseling that also offers more flexibility for out-of-office experiential learning opportunities and real-time goal setting and accountability.
Benefits:
More creative opportunities to help teens that have trouble opening up, resistant to traditional therapy, have had past bad experiences with counselors, or just respond to a more experiential kind of approach.
Identifying, strategizing, and developing a plan together in order to empower clients to reach their personal goals and become the best version of themselves.
Working to improve negative internal thought patterns and transform any bad habits or behaviors into productive ones.
Achieving personal discipline, balance, mood regulation, and better coping skills.
Deeper understanding of a client’s purpose, personality type, passions, and possibilities for their future.
Naturally, the decision to seek out a therapist or a life coach is a very personal one. It might help to imagine yourself getting ready to climb a mountain. You could either hire an expert sherpa and guide for your expedition or a doctor. Which should you choose? Which one will be most helpful during your specific journey?
If you are physically unwell, or would be in danger if you even attempted the climb, a sherpa and guide wouldn’t do you any good. You need to be at a baseline level of good health before you can make the climb at all, so if you’re not, you might need to see the doctor before trying something that challenging. However, if you’re healthy and just need someone to help you with climbing strategy, carrying the load of supplies and finding the best path, the sherpa and guide is the best bet.
In this example, the therapist is the doctor. He or she gets you well enough to take on major challenges in your life by exploring your mental and emotional well-being. The life coach is the sherpa and guide. He or she has an expert knowledge of your climb and can help you reach the summit.
The fundamentals of life coaching are what distinguishes it from therapy. Life coaches do not diagnose the people they work with, while therapists determine illnesses and pathologies so their patients can be clinically treated. Therapists analyze their client’s past as a tool for understanding present behaviors, whereas life coaches simply identify and describe current problematic behaviors so the client can work to modify them. In other words, therapists focus on “why” certain behavioral patterns occur, and coaches work on “how” to work toward a goal.
When you look at a life coach vs. a therapist’s practice, it’s important to recognize that therapists help clients explore and understand their subconscious and unconscious mind. Their goal in this exploration is a deep understanding of behaviors and patterns. Life coaches focus on an individual’s actions and results. Life coaches measure their client’s success with key performance indicators and specific behavioral outcomes and goals.
Therapy and life coaching do share certain traits and aims.
However, whether you choose to work with a life coach or therapist, both work to enable clients to make positive changes in their lives and become more productive. While therapists diagnose and treat from a healthcare perspective, not all therapy clients are ill; many healthy people seek the services of both therapists and life coaches. Therapists may at times work with specific results in mind, such as the cessation of a particular problematic behavior. Despite occasional areas of overlap, the work and processes of therapists and life coaches are distinct and very different.
If you would like more information and discuss a life coaching plan for you or your family, please book a call with Christian Hill.
