You might be wondering, why hire a life coach? But first of all, what is a life coach really? Is there a difference between a life coach and a therapist?

Some people are great at business, have a lot of money, but have no health. Some have great spirituality, but no material possessions. Some have relationships, but no inner peace.

I’m here to tell you, you should have it all.

And this is where a Life Coach comes in.

S/he is someone who guarantees success for you in all areas of your life so you can be the biggest, strongest, happiest badass who’s crushing it. The goal of a life coach, at least from my perspective, is to achieve harmonious balance between career, health, your true soul calling, and your relationships.

Your health in all areas of your life shows you how in flow you are. It shows you how aligned you are with your true purpose. Because God does not only give you one thing. If you are living in flow, you have it all.

You can’t be truly happy if you’re crushing it at work, but yelling at your kids. Or look really fit, but are deeply unsatisfied because you have no meaningful relationships. I believe you can have it all.

How can you tie all these areas of your life together so they can flow in and out of one another, filling you up with energy? How can you make your whole life flow?

The Rise of Coaching

It seems like life coaching is a new fad that became popular in the last few years. There’s health coaches. Relationship coaches. Spirituality coaches. Business coaches. Are they all the same? Different?

In reality coaching has a very solid foundation found in Positive Psychology. You can find a more detailed overview here, but in essence a cool guy named Martin Seligmand realized the field of psychology focused too much on pathology instead of figuring out how to have people live healthier, happier, and more abundant lives.

In essence, Seligman realised there wasn’t enough support out there for people wanting to go from surviving to thriving.

People have used coaches in sports and academia actively for the last 150 years. Only recently have we realized the benefit of having someone that can guide you to results in other areas, such as business, relationships, and life in general.

We could speak endlessly about how the industry of Life Coaching came to be through history and society. I believe the best way to see it is through the lens of the few greats that broke the norms and delivered incredible guidance to us for personal transformation. People like Oprah Winfrey, Tony Robbins, Dr Norman Vincent Peale – people who brought healing and thriving to the masses before it was “cool.”

Usually people become coaches because they went through something themselves (building a business, spiritual awakening, getting more friends). They didn’t feel supported during it and felt like they banged their head on walls in the dark for a long time to figure it out. Now they want to support others in reaching this goal. A coach is a teacher, a guide, a counselor.

Benefits of Coaching

Coaching is also direct-to-consumer. The knowledge comes straight from the factory.

The person went through it and now he’s telling you how. There’s no scientific jargon, no research papers (although good coaches sometimes base their work on research), and no intermediary.

The important thing to note here is that it works. Just how science is also just catching up to ancient wisdom and practices. Just because someone didn’t take the time to prove it in a lab, doesn’t mean it’s not true.

As The Entrepreneur puts it, “Coaches are great in identifying when you are lying to yourself and pointing out any limiting beliefs that may be keeping you back from achieving what you want.”

Also, the learning style is different. Now you don’t have to sit through a boring lecture or read an incomprehensible book. I guess we are going back to our roots of learning from each other, not some authority on a pedestal.

It has been proven we learn best from others by modeling. So what better way to get where you want to be than “hanging out” with someone who’s already got it?

The biggest question is, do you know where you want to go?

How Life Coaching Works

Relationship and business coaches pick you up when you already have a general direction. The beauty of life coaching is that you can apply the concept of coaching to all areas of your life. In essence, what you are doing is solving a problem. A human problem. Together with your coach you will,

#1 Define the starting point:

This is where we are today. These are the problems we are faced with. E.g. depression, not enough money, lack of inner peace.

#2 Define the goal:

This is where we want to get. These are the things I want to achieve. E.g. happiness, an income of $50,000 a month, inner peace.

#3 Formulate a plan:

The plan we follow to get there.

#4 Follow the plan & tweak:

Do the plan! Correct the plan and tweak.

Your Responsibility

There are different levels of everything for everybody and only you know what you need to work on. You have to maintain an immense level of honesty to see where you are lacking.

This is where triggers and other people come in. When something bothers you or you are jealous of someone your subconscious tells you there is something there. Explore it. Go there.

A great way to see where you’re at is with the Wheel of Life (I call it Wheel of Identification) – download at the end of the article.

Exercise

The way to complete it is to label each piece of the pie with an area of your life. For example, relationships, health, business, love, spirituality, fun, etc. I intentionally left it blank so you can make it specific to your situation. The center of the circle is 0 and the circumference is 10. Mark where you feel you are in that specific category with a line and color it in. Repeat for each category.

This is a good visual representation of your life as a whole. You can now strive for every section to be colored to the top. Of course, this is will not happen 100%. Life is a dance, an ebb and flow and you will always be more advanced in some areas than others. But you should strive to have balance between all the areas because we are human and we need all of them to function harmoniously.