A Question to Help You Understand YOURSELF as a Life Coach

Someone once asked me the following question: Why is coaching (not your coaching business, but coaching itself) important to you? What’s so appealing to you about coaching? What makes coaching special to you? As the lead trainer at the iNLP Center life coaching certification program, this question is of utmost importance to me and my students. The idea of one person being able to influence another - profoundly - just through communication. So much daily communication is humdrum and superficial. The coaching context is DIFFERENT. If done well, it can alter the course of someone’s entire life and bring about mental and emotional changes that last a lifetime. Coaching is profound. A life coach is a free spirit. As a life coach, you can help people with whatever you’re skilled at - or interested - in helping with. In a session, you can go in any productive direction. There are principles and protocols, sure. Yet, it’s up to the coach-client relationship, ultimately, to choose where to go and how to get there. Life coaching is open-minded and always interesting to me. You’re never confined to a strict protocol. There are always options (if you’re a skilled coach). A certain kind of space. Not sure what to call this one, but in the coaching context, as a coach, I am in a great space in which I feel very comfortable. When coaching, my mind is at ease and I am accepting, not judgmental. I am focused nearly 100% on someone else. My attention is not on me but focused on another person. Coaching isn’t effortful for me - I am just being myself, really. It’s a great space to be in. Finally, I have a gift for coaching people. It comes naturally to me. It’s just what I do. It feels good to be doing something I feel I was born to do - and would do for free. Coaching fulfills a purpose for me. Why ask yourself these kinds of questions? As a life coach, perhaps the most important success factor is knowing who you are as a life coach and why you’re doing what you do. That might sound cliche’ but it’s true nevertheless. Think about it this way. During your coaching sessions with clients, you guide them to live in accordance with their true self. You invite them to access a higher purpose where clarity and self-belief are fully available. When clients enter this space, they experience a freedom to act a free agents with nothing to hold them back. Self-doubt becomes a thing of the past. Irrational fear, inner conflict, and self-sabotage fall by the wayside in favor of inner alignment with a core purpose. This is the essence of life coaching. How can you help clients get there if you’re not there in your own life?