If you’re stuck in a career rut, a life coach may be able to help you. Life coaches not only help you build your self-esteem, but they can help you with many aspects of your career, from goal setting to improving your public speaking.
What’s more, you can see a life coach both in-person or online. The Life Coach Directory is useful for finding a life coach in your area, and sites like Blush and Growing Self let you speak to a qualified life coach from anywhere you need to.
What is a life coach?
First, it may help to understand the difference between a therapist, a counsellor and a life coach. Some people use these terms interchangeably, but they actually help you with different things.
Therapists - help you work through mental health issues like anxiety and depression. You’ll usually need a few months of in-depth sessions.
Counsellors - help you develop strategies to overcome issues like stress, relationships, anxiety, family conflict, grief and more.
Life coaches - help you set goals and achieve them. It’s all about guidance, empowerment and improvement. We face many challenges in life and life coaching can help guide us through them.
Many people who choose life coaching lack confidence or self-esteem in one or many areas. A life coach helps them build the confidence in themselves that they need to live up to their potential. As well as this, they guide them through the process of building their own action plan to tackle their goals and build the skills they want to master.
Here are just some of the ways in which a life coach could help you with your career and beyond:
- Find your first job
- Get a promotion
- Change careers
- Decide what you want to do as a career
- Improve work/life balance
- Build interpersonal and communication skills
- Build confidence and self esteem
- Improve wellness, both mental and physical
- Organisation, productivity and time management
- Build management skills
- Financial organisation and debt
- Public speaking
- Business coaching for entrepreneurs
What to expect from a life coaching session
A life coaching session will typically last between 45 minutes to an hour. The life coach will try to get to know you and gain an understanding of your life and situation before identifying what areas you want help with. You will agree on some overarching goals together, which will be broken down into smaller, more achievable goals. You will be given some guidance on how to achieve these and be sent away with some small achievements to complete before your next session. It’s important to remember that a life coach is not the final solution to all of your problems - you have to put the work in too.
Some of the techniques your life coach may use to help you include visualisation, affirmations, meditation, and relaxation.
Tips for your first session
- Think about what you want from life coaching before you arrive
- Be prepared to talk honestly and openly - you won't be judged
- Go with an open mind
More wellbeing advice on the alumni blog:
www.cwa.ac.uk/alumni/news/