The profession and service of life coaching was developed to benefit healthy, functioning people who want to create or design their desired present or future by making positive changes in their lives. Life coaching is most often favorably compared to therapy; however, the professions serve different purposes. Counseling and therapy are focused on healing from past hurts and events; while coaching is focused on moving forward from a place of strength.

As a process, coaching is a partnership between the person who is being coached (the client), and her/his trained, certified coach. Coaching uses purposeful conversation and dialogue, powerful questioning, exercises and journaling to help draw out truths from within the client, and to bring clarity to the questions that the person being coached has in relationship to her/his goal. Over time, the experience of coaching is one of transformation, motivation and inspiration.

Some common questions that coaching helps clients to answer include:

• Who am I, really? What’s most true and important about me in relationship to my vision or goal?
• What limiting beliefs do I have that are holding me back from making a decision, taking action, being confident, maintaining focus, or staying motivated?
• Where would I really like to be? What do I really want to do?
• How can I change my response to my circumstances for the better?
• When will I know that I’ve reached my goal?
• Why do I make the choices that I do? What’s influencing me?
• Which, among many, are my most essential values? How do these influence my choices?
• How can I take consistent, inspired action toward my goals?

Coaching is not the same as advising, training, teaching, mentoring, supervising or evaluating-although these skills sets may be used from time to time over the course of the coaching partnership. With coaching, the focus is on improving the client’s quality of life (or one aspect of it). The most valuable resource in this process is the strength, knowledge and intuition that lies inside of the person being coached. A highly skilled, compassionate and committed coach is focused on drawing the client’s internal resources out.

Through coaching, healthy, functional people move into a level of greatness, joy and power that they may have never thought possible. People who are having significant challenges in life are often able to overcome these in record time-and be the better for it-by engaging the support of a professional coach.

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