What Life Coaching Is Not

What Life coaching is not

There are many paths to personal improvement and not all of them are coaching. Coaching has a few characteristics that set it apart.

Therapy

Therapy (and counselling) are much more focused on overcoming problems and tend to look to the past rather than the future. Often, therapy will focus on a single aspect of the client and work solely on producing improvements in that area.

In contrast, coaching will focus on an aspect of the person’s life, but they’ll comprehend the whole person’s performance within that focus area. Life coaching is very much focused on the present and the future; it is about finding out where you want to be in life and how to get there. Sometimes a coach will attend to specific areas (typically self-esteem for negative beliefs) in order to free up progress, but the emphasis is on moving the whole person forward in life.

Fundamentally, however, coaching deals with what is happening now and in the immediate future.

Counselling

In many situations, a counsellor will look at the past to try to formulate a specific solution to a particular problem.

Unlike counselling, coaching is primary present-oriented. The coach will come to have an understanding of how the client’s past has shaped their present, but the focus of life coaching is on where they are now and where they are aiming to be in the future. Every situation, every client and every coaching session is unique, and the overall aim is to enable the individual to take control of their life by accepting responsibility for all that they are and all that they do.

Unlike counselling, coaching is for those who are moving forward from a reasonably stable base. So it is not appropriate, for example, for the mentally ill, those in crisis, with drug problems, crippling financial hardship or history of abuse.

Teaching or Training

Teaching and training are about transferring skills or knowledge to students. A life coach’s role is to guide the client to clarify their own desires, to create their own compelling and achievable goals and to build, maintaining motivation and focus.

Consultancy

Consultants are generally asked to look at particular work-related issues. They usually gather data, analyse functions and quantify requirements, to support proposals designed to create operational or structural change. Their focus is generally on resolving particular functional issues. The life coach adopts a different approach; one where people and personality are paramount and where the changes sought are at personal, psychological level. Coaching in a business environment is not a form of consultancy. Life coaching with its degree of understanding about the attitude and desires of the individuals involved will often enable a company to achieve change in a faster timescale and with longer lasting benefits than those resulting from a standard consultancy approach.

Mentoring

Mentoring is also frequently confused with, or referred to as being interchangeable with, coaching. But the two processes are very different.

A mentor will generally be there to help someone to learn a particular task or to acquire a specific skill-set. The mentor will have a lot of experience in a particular area and will be able to help the client to find short cuts and to learn how to gain specific results in specific areas. The mentor will generally know the ins and outs of a specific job-related situation in advance.

Unlike mentoring, coaching is not instructional. It does not bestow new vocational skills or provide “answers” through the teachings of an expert, though coaches may provide some learning experiences that equip the client with some new tools. Coaches help the client to find their own way; they do not give directions.

Life coaching does not require that the coach should have personal experience of a client’s industry or occupation. Indeed it may be that the absence of experience adds to the effectiveness of coaching in this area- a mentor already knows the answers but a coach may not. The coach works with the individual so that they can first discover the questions for themselves and then their own answers.

Source...Home Learning College