Most people don’t know what a life coach is or what a life coach does. It should come as no surprise that most of us hesitate to seek out a life coach without knowing up-front how a life coach might help us. Why invest in hiring a life coach unless you can expect some meaningful benefit. This article concisely describes what a life coach is and what they do for their clients. Then we summarize many of the ways clients benefit from the life coaching experience focusing on the top 10 proven ways life coaching can change your life.
Note: If you prefer to jump directly to the list of the Top 10 Proven Ways Life Coaching can Change Your Life, click HERE.
What is a Life Coach?
“A life coach is a person that works in partnership with an individual to help them reach their potential across all facets of life. Just as a professional sports player has a coach to work on the technical and psychological aspects of their performance, with a life coach anyone can take a structured and disciplined approach to personal development and betterment. An accredited life coach plays this role.” nlpcenter.org
A life coach is your partner who counsels and encourages clients through personal or career challenges. A life coach helps guide clients to reach their personally identified goals. Each human being is different and as such they have different goals and challenges to work through. Often a life coach helps clients in personal and/or professional spheres. Issues might include career advancement, work relationships, and work-life balance.
The journey toward attaining your goals and realizing your dreams will be difficult. There are always roadblocks and pitfalls along the way. Having a partner beside you on the journey improves your chance of reaching your intended destination. A life coach is not just any partner. Your life coach is an expert in avoiding roadblocks and smoothing out potholes in life’s path.
What does a life coach do?
According to betterup.org, “It’s important to understand the role a life coach plays. And a lot of the time, that comes down to personalized goals… Here are just a few examples of what a coach can do:
- Improve productivity and focus
- Improve overall work performance
- Improve time management, stress management, prioritization
- Improve self-confidence, self-compassion, and self-esteem
- Improve collaboration and teamwork skills
- Improve communication skills
- Better balance or harmony of work and personal life…
- Improve decision-making skills
- Manage caregiver fatigue…
- Help people find their purpose, meaning, and passions in life
- Manage stress and build healthy habits for stress management…
- Navigate and cope with grief…
- Navigate change, uncertainty, and the unknown
- Some life coaches also help with things like… relationships, divorce, marriage, and more.”
Why Hire a Life Coach?
Many of the Life Coaching with a Smile clients are struggling to attain a personal goal, cope with a transition (such as retirement or the loss of a loved one), or improve difficult relationships. According to verywellmind.com, “There are a number of indications that working with a life coach could be helpful for you. These signs include:
- Frequent irritability
- High levels of stress and/or anxiety
- Inability to break bad habits
- Lack of fulfillment in your social life
- Persistent feeling of dissatisfaction at work
- Sense of blocked creativity
In recent years, life coaches have acquired a considerable presence in the mainstream. Indeed, a growing number of creatives, executives, and entrepreneurs are now teaming up with life coaches to attain success in their professional and personal lives.”
People often feel alone in their struggles through life. Many businesses, government agencies and non-profit organizations are making coaching resources available for their employees. Many report very a very high return on investment from their coaching programs.
The Top Ten Proven Ways Life Coaching can Change Your Life
#1. Achieve goals
We all have dreams in life, but very few people crystalize these aspirations into tangible goals and specific time-controlled action plans. A major benefit of life coaching is being able to define your life goals and create a concrete, doable plan to achieve them. According to a study reported in Frontiers in Psychology, individual and group coaching can help to reduce procrastination and facilitate goal attainment.
#2. Cope with Change, Loss or Transitions
According to coaching-online.org, grief coaching can produce the following benefits for clients:
- Feeling less alone and knowing that someone understands what you’re going through.
- Understanding that letting go doesn’t mean that you forget your loved one.
- Have a better understanding of grief and recognize what you need to do to move forward.
- Getting a chance to discover the endless possibilities after a loss.
- Having the ability to realize that there is growth in grief.
- Finding meaning in your life.
#3. Improve relationships
Relationships are the glue that combines individuals with society and provides shared fulfillment in life. From marriages to friendships and beyond, strong relationships are a critical contributor to happiness. Coaching clients re[port they are better equipped to feel and express empathy and appreciation following coaching. 73% of people who hired a life coach improved their relationships according to the International Coach Federation Global Coaching Study.
#4. Improve self-confidence
A study by the International Coaching Federation (IFC) discovered that 80% of people who hired a life coach reported an improvement in self-confidence.
#5. Improve communication
72% of people who hire a life coach improve their communication skills, according to the IFC study mentioned above. Better communication is one of the primary benefits of life coaching.
#6. Increase income and reduce debt
The skills you develop while working with a life coach will focus your resources while pursuing career goals or growing your business to new heights. This is one of the key benefits of coaching in a business environment. 70% of people report that coaching improved their work performance according to the ICF study. According to Luisa Zhou, several studies report the following benefits experienced by coaching clients:
- Financial coaching can help reduce financial stress. (Urban Institute)
- Financial coaching and confidence, budgeting, saving, and goal formation have been linked together. (Journal of Financial Theory)
- 54% of people who participated in a financial coaching program and had no prior savings, had some savings at the end of the program. (Citigroup)
- On the other hand, 48% of those with savings at the start of the project increased that amount after receiving financial coaching. (Citigroup)
- 55% of people with unsecured debt at the start of the program had less debt at the end of it. The median decrease was $3,005). (Citigroup)
#7. Eliminate bad habits
When bad habits (e.g., procrastination) become embedded in our day-to-day life, they diminish our ability to perform. Working with an impartial life coach will help you determine what these habits may be and learn to eliminate them. For example. three times more people lose weight successfully when they work with a health coach compared to other methods. (Obesity Silver Spring)
#8. Reduce stress, anxiety and worry
Stress is a common occurrence for a large portion of the population. Financial burdens, career-related issues, or personal relationship problems can result in mental instability and stress-related health concerns. Life coaches have access to relaxation techniques, such as mindfulness and meditation, which can reduce stress in your life. Worry and anxiety are society-wide health problems with a number of complex elements, none of which are an easy fix. However, having an ally in your corner who understands your triggers can improve the way you deal with issues. According to BMC Psychology, life coaching is effective at reducing psychological distress.
#9. Improve Health and Wellness
According to evercoach.com, “Wellness Coaching is proven to drastically improve people’s quality of life and reduce depressive symptoms. A wellness coach can help a person achieve a life of wellness by helping them set the right goals and stick to them. Wellness coaching has been proven to contribute to significant improvements in quality of life, reduction in depressive symptoms and perceived stress, and maintaining these improvements for a long time after coaching.”
Health coaching can help lower healthcare costs. (Medical Care.) Wellness coaching can reduce depressive symptoms, perceived stress levels, and improve quality of life and physical, emotional, social, cognitive, and spiritual functioning (Mayo Clinic.) Health coaching can improve the management of chronic diseases. It can have a positive effect on people’s social life and their behavioral, physiological, and psychological conditions. People improve their weight management, physical and mental health status, and increase their physical activity. (Patient Education and Counseling)
#10. Find happiness
According to Dennis Buttimer, M.Ed, CEAP, RYT, CHC, a life and wellness coach at Thomas F. Chapman Family Cancer Wellness at Piedmont Healthcare, “I think anyone can benefit from coaching because we all have behaviors, habits or blind spots we may want to address. A coach can help you determine specific ways you can improve your quality of life so you feel more reasonably happy. We can’t be perfectly happy in this world – there’s no such thing – but we can all be more reasonably happy.”
By defining life goals, creating balance, and committing to a better version of yourself with the aid of a life coach, you open up the prospect of finding happiness. Helping others find happiness is one of the main reasons people become a life coach.
Final Words about the Benefits of Life Coaching
The benefits of life coaching don’t stop with just the top ten proven ways life coaching can change your life. Luisa Zhou summarized many statistics related to coaching from a wide variety of sources. She reports the following:
Business and Career Coaching
- 70% of coaching clients improve work performance, communication, and relationships thanks to coaching. (Institute of Coaching)
- Coaching has positive side effects on performance and skills, wellbeing, coping, goal-directed self-regulation, and work attitudes. (The Journal of Positive Psychology)
- 75% of coaching clients say that the value they get from executive and leadership coaching is “considerably greater” or “far greater” than the money and time they invest. (International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring)…
- Executive coaching can help women improve their work satisfaction, wellbeing, and performance. (International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring)
- Employees who receive coaching receive higher compensation, a greater number of promotions, feel more committed and satisfied with their careers, and are more likely to believe that they will advance in their careers than non-mentored employees. (The Journal of Applied Psychology)
Personal Skills Coaching
- Coaching can have a relatively big effect on coaching clients’ coping capacities and resilience, attitudes, subjective wellbeing, goal attainment, and performance. (The Journal of Positive Psychology)…
- A study of 391 people shows that one-on-one coaching can improve coaching clients’ psychological wellbeing and mitigate threats to mental health in the form of excessive and prolonged stress, low resilience, and poor satisfaction with life. (Journal of Medical Internet Research)
- Health coaching can improve the management of chronic diseases. It can have a positive effect on people’s social life and their behavioral, physiological, and psychological conditions. People improve their weight management, physical and mental health status, and increase their physical activity. (Patient Education and Counseling)
- Financial coaching can help reduce financial stress. (Urban Institute)
- Financial coaching and confidence, budgeting, saving, and goal formation have been linked together. (Journal of Financial Theory)
- 54% of people who participated in a financial coaching program and had no prior savings, had some savings at the end of the program. (Citigroup)
- On the other hand, 48% of those with savings at the start of the project increased that amount after receiving financial coaching. (Citigroup)
- 62% of coaching clients improved their career opportunities through coaching. (2009 ICF Global Coaching Study)
Clear evidence abounds that life coaching yields many beneficial results for many people. In fact, the possible benefits go far beyond just the top 10 proven ways life coaching can change your life.
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