Why Life and Recovery Coaching
People who engage a life coach do so often because they lack self-confidence, clarity or direction. They find themselves stuck in a routine or rut that is neither enjoyable nor exciting. When this happens, self-esteem is low or the difficulty they face feels too great. A life coach simply works to restore a person’s declining confidence by helping them see, recognise and act on the belief that they have the ability to reach their full potential. A life coach’s work can be summarised in the words: Guidance, Enhancement, Empowerment. Guidance involves giving someone the tools and assistance they need to expand their perspective and to show them the way to prioritize, set and achieve their objectives. Enhancement involves helping someone improve their skills and focus to help them move from where they are to where they desire to be. Empowerment involves helping the individual realise their own self-worth and self-belief which has been diminished. A Life Coach is also an accountability partner who helps you to stick by the commitment you have made to yourself.
Coaching Vs Counselling
The most significant distinction between coaching and counselling is the approach. Life and Recovery coaches help people chart a new course in life particularly when they are recovering from mental health issues. This way individuals are able to attain specific objectives. They assist you in introspection and problem-solving. They are preoccupied with the now and the future. Counselors, on the other hand, focus on specific difficulties at hand and dig into emotional resolutions to old problems in order to move forward, seeking solutions to those specific problems while emphasising “healing” as one of the primary goals.
How Life & Recovery Coaching works
Your coach will conduct a “Wheel of Life” assessment in order to help you prioritize the major areas of your life that matter to you. Together with your coach you will create a customized wheel of life that has meaning for you. Once your “Wheel of Life” is reasonably ready, with the help of your coach you will determine which are the areas you are good at and which are the areas you feel the need for improvement, and also where the urgency exists. This now offers you quick, visual overview as well as reminder of how effective and satisfied you are with your life, what are the priority areas you need to focus on and how you can get there. From here forward, you will engage with your coach regularly to discus strategies on making progress in these areas. You coach will share effective strategies and tools that can help you make progress so that your wheel of life is eventually balanced.
Some Areas where Life and Recovery Coaching can Help you
Career
Career coaching can help you to create positive strategies to find a job you love or be more content in your working life. Your career coach can guide you in getting a promotion, finding work-life balance, choosing the right career, and other related issues.
Relationships
Family coaching will help you to create healthy and happy family dynamics. You might work on improving communication, dealing with conflict or strengthening family ties. Parenting coaching helps you to develop your own resources for the challenging and rewarding job of being a parent. Parenting can be lonely without a good support network, and a parenting coach helps to fill that gap, giving you someone in your corner to cheer on your successes and help overcome difficulties.
Communication
The goal is to learn to communicate effectively in various settings. In Communication Coaching, your coach will collaborate closely with you to help identify communication gaps so that you can systematically learn to fix these gaps and communicate your ideas effectively. Their function varies depending on the context in which you are seeking to communicate. The emphasis might be on both verbal and textual communication.
Performance
Performance coaching is all about helping you to excel in in what task and position you are expected to perform by mastering successful strategies of work peformance and eliminating those that are counter-productive.
What is Life Coaching?
Coaching is a form of development in which an experienced person, called a coach, supports a learner or client in achieving a specific personal or professional goal by providing training and guidance. The learner is sometimes called a coachee. Occasionally, coaching may mean an informal relationship between two people, of whom one has more experience and expertise than the other and offers advice and guidance as the latter learns; but coaching differs from mentoring by focusing on specific tasks or objectives, as opposed to more general goals or overall development.
Who is Life Coaching for?
Coaching is for individuals who are ready to take responsibility for themselves and for their lives. It’s for people who dare to dream, and are committed to take action to make their dreams a reality. Coaching is for people ready to invest in themselves so as to significantly improve their careers and their lives.
What are the areas in which my Coach can help me?
Your will focus on improving areas of your wellbeing. They might help you create strategies for losing weight or getting in shape; ways to manage and come to terms with an illness; ways to reduce stress and increase your vitality or basically any area in the wheel of life (please refer below).
How can a Coach in any challenge I'm dealing with?
Your life coach may have one or more specialized niche areas, but they will also be skilled at general life coaching techniques. Life coaching helps you work on areas that bring more balance, happiness and success into your life. You might work to improve aspects of your life such as stress management, self esteem, time management, organizational skills, goal-setting, work/life balance and interpersonal skills.
What is the Process of Coaching?
Coaching is a two-way communication process that requires that the Coach and the Coachee both are fully engaged and motivated to set specific measurable goals, agree on next steps in terms of actions and timing, and gain a commitment. The steps involved in the process are given below
STEP 1: Establish Focus
The first step of any coaching conversation is to establish the focus for that conversation. This sets the stage for coaching conversations so there is a clear outcome identified, whether the conversations is two minutes or two hours.
Questions to ask: What would you like to get out of this conversation? What’s the real issue we are trying to discuss?
STEP 2: Discover Possibilities
Once you’ve established the focus of your conversation, it’s time to use good discovery questioning, or powerful open-ended questions, to elicit ideas. This is the brainstorming stage of the conversation, working toward determining all the options that are available to achieve an outcome to the conversation. Spending some time in this step allows a lot of solutions and ideas to surface—exactly what is needed to generate the best ideas to reach goal.
Questions to ask: What are your ideas on how best to reach that goal? What else?
STEP 3: Remove Barriers
In this stage, the coach’s role is to encourage the employee to determine what he or she thinks is the best next step, determine how to secure any needed resources, and understand what might get in the way. Thinking about potential roadblocks and how to clear them helps employees adapt and continue forward even in the face of challenges.
Questions to ask: What might get in the way of you accomplishing this? How could you adapt or respond
STEP 4: Acknowledge Awareness
This step is about increased awareness, either on the part of the coach or the coachee. This is the “aha” stage, a stage where, through the questioning in the previous step, the coachee has discovered options that may have never been considered before. With this new awareness, the coachee is then better positioned to determine actions to take to achieve the identified goal.
Questions to ask: How has your thinking changed as we’ve discovered new possibilities? What does this mean for you in terms of different actions you might take to achieve your goal?