Virtuosity - Life Coaching - NLP - Bach Flowers - EFT - Wellbeing Consultants - Melbourne

An overview of Life Coaching

What does Coaching involve?
Coaching helps people:

Set priorities in their life
Achieve a better work-life balance.
Understand your own strengths and weaknesses
Resolve problems in their personal life
Overcome obstacles
Achieve their goals
Identify their life values
Help them create an action plan
Act as a sounding board
Challenge them to achieve greater things
Stick to their resolutions
Acknowledge their successes
Bring clarity into your life

How did Life Coaching start?
Life Coaching began in California in the early 1980s. Therapists, counsellors and other professionals found that clients wanted personal support in their life. These clients were fit and well, in that they didn't have mental or physical problems. But they needed guidance. A medical or therapeutic program would therefore be irrelevant. What people wanted was someone to help them achieve their goals. Thus personal Life Coaching began. Who can use a life coach?
1. People who want to succeed, whether at work or in relationships:
They are sometimes held back, whether through fear, timidity, or procrastination.

2. People who feel stressed, often by their work:
Many want to spend more time with their family or spouse. Others want to down-shift and lead a simpler life.

3. People who feel something is lacking in their life:
Whether a community or time for themselves. Coaches can help them change their priorities.

Growth of stress:
A survey of 650 GPs in the UK, who have practiced for more than 15 years, reveals that society has become much more stressful. Australia is similar to this. The survey, which was published in the British Medical News Review, shows that:

80% of GPs said the number of patients seeking help for stress related problems has increased significantly over the period.
58% said their patients were drinking more; half blamed stress to the rise.
Nearly half said they are making more psychiatric referrals than they were in 1979.
The survey paints a picture of people who are weighed down by stress, young adults finding it difficult to cope, marital problems are being resolved by divorce, and elderly people are increasingly left to fend for themselves.

This survey, like many others, shows that people need coaching advice, and that coaching is accepted even among conservative GPs.

How Coaching compares with Counselling or Therapy:
Coaching is much newer than therapy or counselling. But many therapists are adding coaching to their repertoire because it is so popular.
Therapy and counselling is essentially for people who are unwell. Whereas coaching is for well people who need guidance.
Coaches don't provide answers:
Why? Because clients don´t do what people tell them. They do only what they want to do. So until they have decided to quit their job or move to Alaska, there is nothing a coach can do to persuade them of that.

So what is the role of a coach?

Help clients understand themselves
To help priotize their lives
To facilitate change by being a sounding board
To help the client to see the alternatives.

Nevertheless Life Coaches do guide people into achieving change. And when a client reveals what they want, a Life Coach pushes them into achieving their goal. But this isn´t the same as telling them what to do.

The different types of Coaching:
There are three main types of coaching:

Telephone coaching
Face to face coaching
Email coaching

Telephone Coaching:

Telephone coaching is the main method used by coaches. In fact when coaches talk about "coaching", they mean "telephone coaching".
Telephone coaching does away with the wasted time spent travelling or waiting. Neither you or your coach has to dress up and you don´t have to fight traffic.
When people think of coaching, they assume that it involves face-to-face. This is perhaps because therapy is usually conducted in this way. But this isn´t the case for coaching. Coaching is predominantly conducted by telephone. And during the phone conversation, most clients feel that the coach are there with them. For although the phone conversation is business-like and methodical it is also charged with emotion because the client can reveal things they don´t reveal to anyone else.

Typical telephone coaching formats:

Typically, telephone coaching involves two, three or four telphone calls a month.
The calls are usually 30-45 minutes in length.
This form of coaching often involves also email contact during the coaching period.

Face to Face Coaching:

Face-to-face coaching has many advantages. You meet each other in person and the coach can observe gaps between word and body language and this provides more clues and a coach can more readily understand what the client is really trying to say.
Meetings can take place in the client´s or the coaches home, or in in an office, a quiet place in an hotel etc.
Once a client has had a program of four face-to-face coaching sessions, they may decide, to opt for further program of tele-coaching. This lets the client unburden themselves, and tell the coach their progress. It also lets the coach gently encourage them to stick to their resolutions, and maintain towards their goals.
The price, frequency and duration on in-person coaching is the same as for telephone coaching.

Email Coaching:

Email coaching is often used as an extension of telephone coaching.
Email works well for clients who feel happiest behind a keyboard. This can also involve the coach sending them weekly lessons on how to achieve their goals.
Sometimes coaches offer stand-alone email coaching. This involves an unlimited number of emails passing between the client and coach each week. At the end of the week, the coach may summarize what has been discussed.
This is sometimes done in a more structured system. The coach gets information from the client about their problems and concerns, and regularly email them about their progress in these areas. The emails will ask questions and seek responses, and will thus help the client to achieve change.
You want to have Coaching, but are still unsure:

Contact your potential coach and talk in general about your area of concern.
This initial inquiry can be done on the phone, via email or face to face.

What happens when you have decided for Coaching:
If you as a client decided you want to have coaching then you get in contact with your chosen coach, who will have an engagement process.
You then receive an information package prior your first session from your coach, which might include:

A welcome letter
A brochure
"Before our first session"
"My commitment to you" form
"What I need from you" form
Questionnaire
Some exercises to do before the first call, plus information on when the coach needs the answers back.

When would Coaching not succeed:

If a client is not receptive to change, nothing a coach says will have any effect.
Sometimes people refuse to believe that their behaviour is causing problems. Others may be unable to express their emotions.
If, after the first month, the coaching is not having any effect, the coach as well as the client will have to consider terminating the sessions.

Virtuosity recognises and aligns itself with the Code of Ethics of the International Coaching Federation. (ICF)