Some of the world’s most successful people have worked with a life coach. From Oprah Winfrey and Bill Gates, through to athletes, actors and CEOs. But life coaching isn’t just for the rich and famous. Life coaching can help empower anyone to make decisions about their life, and enable profound change, through collaborative conversations. Before we get stuck into the reasons people need life coaching, let’s remind ourselves what life coaching is.
What is a life coach?
A life coach helps clients to improve their lives by clarifying goals, identifying limiting beliefs and obstacles that are holding them back and coming up with strategies to overcome each obstacle. They can focus on one or more areas of your life, including relationships, careers and the day-to-day. Life coaching removes the struggle so you can truly love the life you live. They can support you to thrive in life, helping you to perform at your fullest potential across any or all areas.
The reasons that individuals choose to work with a life coach are plentiful. There’s usually, but not always, a driving factor that people are aware of and a need for change.
Here, we dig deeper into 12 of the most common reasons why you might choose to work with a life coach.
1. You have low self-confidence
A lack of confidence can have a very negative effect on one or more areas of your life. It can be quite debilitating and it’s one of the common issues that are brought to coaching sessions. Confidence coaching helps to raise your self-esteem and create a more positive outlook on life. By challenging any limiting beliefs you hold about yourself, you can boost confidence and build a strong self-image.
2. Anxiety, depression and stress are regular occurrences in your life
Life can be stressful. How we perceive our challenges and failures across our work, family and social lives is integral to how we feel on a daily basis and how we move forward. There are more external pressures in our world than ever before. Social and cultural norms we feel compelled to live by, a constant stream of negative news from around the world, not to mention a global pandemic that has changed the lives of everyone. Life coaching can help you to gain perspective and move through past disheartening emotions. Learning to disrupt and retrain your automatic thought patterns can create new neural pathways in the brain, which become stronger over time, until a more positive set of behaviours and thought patterns become the norm.
3. You struggle to be fully present
In the words of Ferris Bueller, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. And so many of us do. Being present means being engaged with life, connected with others, listening to others about their experience of life and doing so with kindness. Being present allows us to fully show up for ourselves and others. On a deep level, it means being able to sit with challenging emotions, without getting caught up in them. Many life coaches work with a number of practices that can be applied to different areas of your life, to help you be more present in a range of circumstances. Mindfulness, meditation, building a routine and taking screen breaks to name but a few.
4. You procrastinate
We’re all guilty of procrastination from time to time. I mean, who really wants to clean the oven? But if you find yourself regularly delaying or postponing things, then you probably find that the activities you chose to do instead of things you should be doing, are laced with guilt or panic that you still haven’t done what you needed to do.
Add to that the many ways we can now procrastinate so easily, (ever fallen down a youtube hole or spent an hour mindlessly scrolling Instagram?) and you can see how that cycle can very quickly become never-ending. Getting out of that cycle however can seem daunting, if not impossible. Life coaches break this down to find out the cause of your procrastination, set goals and tasks and bring accountability to the process.
5. You’re facing a major change or transition in your life
There’s not one of us who can say we haven’t experienced a change in the last few years, but sometimes external changes also bring about internal transitions too. The death of someone close to you, moving house or location, having babies, being made redundant – these too are all examples of change that can make us question our beliefs and values. As children, we often assume that by the time we’re an adult, life will be stable. We’ll have it all figured out. But that is rarely the case. In fact, it is more than likely that we will all go through several transitions in our lives and this is the natural ebb and flow, but endings and beginnings are hard, even when the outcome is positive and can make us question our sense of self. Life coaches can help navigate these times, building bridges to the other side of change.
6. You want to find your life purpose
Some people know exactly what they want in life and how to get it. Many, however, don’t. You might even think you have no clue who you are and what will make you happy. Working with a life coach can help to uncover your skills, talents and natural gifts. It can help you discover who you are and what brings meaning to your life and therefore, what gives you purpose. A life coach will use open questions and deep listening, that leads you through a process of self-discovery so that you can pivot in the direction that will bring you clarity and understanding for your future goals.
7. You need help setting a clear vision to achieve your goals
This brings us nicely to reason number 7. Goal setting is usually more complicated than it sounds. Short-term goals can be tricky to set as you go through constantly changing thoughts, wants and needs, as well as external events having the capability to drastically affect your course. Long term goals can be difficult to visualise and prove overwhelming in how far off or how complicated they might be to achieve.
A life coach can guide you through the process of goal setting to help you clarify your immediate needs and wants, as well as the future vision for yourself. Cutting through the noise and breaking down your goals into tasks or steps that you can work towards, to build the life you dream of.
8. You don’t feel good enough
Many of us feel we’re not good enough and these feelings often begin in childhood. Our high intensity, cult of personality culture is competitive and urges us to look outside of ourselves for our self-worth. It also tells us repeatedly that there is something wrong with us and we should try to fix ourselves. Every face cream, every ideal body we are shown in magazines, unrealistic portrayals of love and success on TV, tell us that if we only had more wealth and fame, if we only change ourselves to reach perfection, then we too could be good enough. On top of that, many of us internalise negative perceptions and beliefs about ourselves.
The weight of not feeling good enough can be crushing.
Working with a life coach can help you dismantle the limiting beliefs you hold about yourself and question how you think others perceive you. The truth is, we’re all good enough, but it requires a change in mindset to truly believe that and a life coach can help make that happen.
9. You suffer from imposter syndrome
Related to not feeling good enough and having low self-esteem, imposter syndrome often affects us in a work setting and when we are actually doing well. According to the Harvard Business Review, imposter syndrome is loosely defined as doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. It’s a relatively new term, having been coined in 1978 when a study focused on high achieving women. This self-doubt can be crippling and cause you to live in a cycle of anxiety and trying to prove yourself, or it can cause you to sabotage your own success.
Luckily, moving past imposter syndrome is possible and a life coach can help you do so by addressing the underlying beliefs you hold about yourself, which you may not even be aware of.
10. You want to improve your finances, health, relationships or career, but can’t see how
Whether it’s your career, your finances, health or relationships, or maybe all of them at once, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. None of these things exists in a vacuum and they all contain various complexities that can be difficult to move through. Perhaps you own a business and are finding it tough to build or you are struggling to keep it afloat. Maybe you can’t seem to find a partner or one that you have a deep connection with. Or you feel like you want to advance in your career but don’t know-how. Do you repeat financial mistakes that keep you trapped in debt, unable to save or living paycheck to paycheck?
A life coach can help you wade through the mud of these situations to see where hope exists and help you identify practical steps you can take to resolve both physical problems and limiting beliefs that keep you stuck.
11. You feel overwhelmed.
Feeling overwhelmed can induce feelings of anxiety and stress. It can feel debilitating, stealing from us our sense of control, keeping us stuck and unable to make decisions or move forward. It’s an intense emotion that leads us to believe something is too challenging to overcome and we can feel trapped by our thoughts and emotions.
It doesn’t have to be this way though. Being in a state of overwhelm indicates that our survival instincts have been triggered and we’re in a state of flight, fright or freeze. A life coach can help you to untangle these emotions, become more aware of when they are happening and put in place methods that help you to decrease or disarm the intensity of these feelings.
12. You feel lost, or simply don’t know where to begin.
Many people come to me with no clear idea of what they want to change. They just know that change is necessary. We often become the roles we’re used to playing; wife, mother, husband, leader, friend, colleague, carer. So much so that we forget what drives us and makes us tick. The sense of being out of control often comes when that sense of self is lost.
A life coach can help you to develop a stronger sense of self. To find the things you connect with that make you feel good and realign yourself with your passions.
If any of these reasons resonated with you, life coaching could support you to become the best version of yourself. Get in touch for a free consultation to find out how coaching can help you.
