Sometimes, it may feel like there's nowhere to turn. NO one understands.
When discussing topics with your friends, family, or acquaintances, there's worry or fear. Things feel heavy, and everything is piling up; the walls are caving in, time is running out, and no one understands. Life has this way of overwhelming us. Or your experience is different. Maybe life feels like it's just plugging along, but the days are blurred together, and suddenly you wonder: where's all the time going, and is this really my life?
We are all battling something—even when it seems like we're not.
Coaching is a partnership. We all can benefit from receiving support.
A coaching session with a life coach is an exciting open conversation, an agreement with a mutual commitment, with some learning and personal development.
Regular, consistent, one-on-one coaching conversations are the key to moving forward in life.
Generally, all clients come to a coaching session with ONE topic in mind - usually, something that keeps them stuck or something they would like more clarity around. Therefore, gaining the most significant benefits and investing time and energy to focus on one topic each session is imperative. Bouncing from topic to topic isn't compelling, and impossible to gain speed when a session is thirty minutes long (I offer 30-60 minutes, but most choose 30 minutes due to busy schedules and attention span). Clients want to work on topics often involving an action they would like to take but a belief or fear that may be holding them back. Sometimes it's a habit they want to break or start but need help knowing where to begin or lack support. It's never about more information. We are flooded with information.
A life coach can serve as another means of support in your life.
This support can help you maintain physical and mental health, ward off stress, and even reduce depression and anxiety. In addition, people with robust support systems are more likely to achieve their goals, value life, improve their quality of life, and thrive. This is why the support of a life coach can make it more likely that you make changes in your life and be a total game-changer.
I aim to provide the tools, guidance, and encouragement to find your own path.
Everyone knows what to do but needs more support and accountability.
In a coaching session, you will rarely receive direct advice; that's not the intent of a life coach. Instead, a coach will guide you through questions to help you understand your assumptions, stories, and beliefs, open up opportunities and overcome obstacles to make progress quickly. It's fun to proactively identify opportunities for improvement, help establish goals and stay in contact with my clients. I have a very active community site that offers a live chat, programs (some free, some for a small fee), community boards(all sorts of topics), videos, webinars, and even live in-person meetups. Check it out CLICK HERE
It is interesting when I meet someone that doesn't know what coaching is. I have personally experienced that most of my clients are on the East Coast of the United States, and they clearly understand not only what coaching is but how valuable it is. I have a few clients sprinkled around the West Coast and Canada. Locals usually need clarification about what a coach does or how it works. There's a perception that coaching is like that p.e. teacher in middle school, you know, the one that made you play dodgeball and had a whistle.
Anyways I thought I would create a fun list (not a complete list either, I can coach on any topics, well, there are some that I would refer you to someone else if I feel it requires some specialty) of coaching topics that I have a lot of experience with. This can help you understand what coaching is if that's what you're looking for or if you're a current client; maybe you want to dive deeper and are still determining what area. Pick one, and let's get started!
People Pleaser: Are you living your life how you want to live it, or are your choices, decisions, and actions coming from the fear of hurting other people's feelings, letting them down, fear of disappointing others? Living life attaching one's well-being to the approval and validation of others is living life from a fake it-to-you-make-it approach. Often people lose themselves and what they want or what will make them happy. I love happiness coaching, defining happiness for you, and getting it. This does take a deep commitment and willingness to change.
Manage Conflict: Healthy communication skills are often learned by trial and error. If you're finding it hard to communicate with anyone in any relationship (work, personal life, family, friends), this is a great topic to get coaching around. If you have a habit of creating conflict, this will take some investment into coaching, with each session coming armed with some context of where you've faced it in your life recently or perhaps going to. You'll gain some clarity with each scenario if you're open to it. The more receptive you are, the faster your results.
Delegation and Prioritization: Discover how to prioritize your workload and then delegate or eliminate what you can't (or shouldn't) manage. Often we add more to our plate without thinking about taking something off. Are you overburdened? Having a thinking partner helps establish priorities, and discovering your value and worth will take some time, but worth it when your life is lighter and more productive. Something common or normal with this area is needing to know where to start, depending on your situation, and each session is unique and personalized for every client.
Career or Business Growth & Direction: Want a career or business that you're thriving in, stretched, challenged, and feel fulfilled? This would be a great one to get coaching around. This usually requires some time, and multiple sessions, especially if there are walls or resistance to seeing the barriers.
Goal Setting: Have a goal you want to achieve, start, create, or master? It can be anything from managing a clean house to your health. We would work first on your WHY and work through each barrier as they come up. Accountability and celebrations are also fun to add to each coaching session. Firm boundaries are an excellent way to ensure you stay on track versus navigating life as it unfolds. Depending on the goal, timeline, and size of the goal, this could take a commitment to regular coaching sessions.
Productivity and Life Balance: Finding ways to manage your time better. Often we need to see where the problems are or time wasters in our own life. Having someone unbiased and detached can identify where your blind spots are. You can't change what you don't see. Your overall well-being is dependent on this area.
Habits and Routines: This defines us in any area of our life. We are a product of the patterns, choices, and decisions we establish, especially those we do on autopilot(floating through life). Are there habits that you want to change, break or start? This takes consistent coaching; weekly is suggested, checking in, seeing what's working and what's not, and making adjustments.
Motivation: This broad category can apply to all areas of your life. This does take being committed to regular, frequent coaching and working on the minor parts of your life, then going to the larger, with each level improving the momentum does create a monuments impact.
Increased Self-Awareness: Working on developing the right strategy to enable you to partner with people around you and also identify your blind spots. This can be in a specific area of your life or all areas. For example, if you're living life by just going through the motions, your awareness might be limited(low); with each level of increased awareness, you will experience a more prosperous, richer, fuller life.
Accountability: If this is important to you in a specific area of your life, this will take some creation, creativity, and agreement with me to ensure that we create an accountability process that is unique for you. I have had many clients hire me to do this; each was unique and fun. Coaching for this varies dramatically from daily, weekly, and bi-weekly to monthly.
Boundaries: This is important in all aspects of life. We will review how to correctly set them and ensure they always remain in place—regular coaching to work through any resistance or setbacks.
Expectations and agreements: As humans, we tend to create a lot of expectations in our minds of how life should be and how others should be, and doing this causes a lot of resentment, frustration, anger, and ultimately an unhappy life. Coaching is vital if you are frustrated that things aren't going how you think they should. The key is to be willing, open, and curious to see things differently, an experiment, if you will. This takes time, but the more relaxed, open, and patient you are, the greater the results. Agreements are an excellent way to combat expectations when possible.
Collaboration: This can be a way to partner in working together on something essential, really big, or even minor, something that you want a thinking partner to navigate through. It can be on any variety of topics. So often, we think of our friends and family as support, but sometimes having someone detached from your immediate world and a non-bias view and bold honesty gets you more significant results. Someone with no attachment to your world, someone that can see your blind spots and call you out on your beliefs.
Communication: Similar to conflict, we would use current or future situations to work on healthy communication strategies; this takes learning, applying, practicing, and honest reflecting(a great skill to learn to do on your own in time and with practice and learning to be gentle with yourself as you learn and develop). Over time with regular coaching, you'll naturally learn to communicate better.
Feedback: Sometimes, we want an honest opinion, and those closest to us, though they have good intentions, may not offer the best advice. Life coaching is a structured process to uncover things that may need to be addressed, skills that need improvement, and something that could be learned, applied, and tested. For example, I have some clients who want tough love, which is easy for me to deliver! It's often believed that life is hard, complex, intricate, or complicated, but that is why your life is hard; you think it is, so that will come true. Life coaching is great at uncovering the movie's script of your reality and offering a new perspective.
The Girlfriend Experience: This is a popular one. This sets the first 5-10 minutes of each session to bitch, moan, and complain about whatever is happening. Then roughly 5 minutes for me, your life coach, to seek to understand a bit more about that topic and offer what I hear. Usually, a misunderstanding or something could be viewed differently, significantly impacting how you navigate forward powerfully.
Management, Team building, and Leadership: If you're in a management position or leadership role, this is great to fine-tune all the moving parts of leadership. In many areas I like to coach, leadership is one I find fascinating and deeply enjoy. I am a natural leader, and with owning a business for many years, I have a passion for leadership. This does take commitment and frequent regular sessions. Each situation is different. Communication, expectations, delegation, and motivation are a few areas to focus on.
Critical incident management: As a CISM (critical incident stress management) coach, I can assist anyone experiencing a recent critical incident. The purpose is to provide private coaching that's not attached to anyone or anything (for example, this is used a lot for first responders, they fear looking weak or fear their job will be in jeopardy if they seek help). Coaching for this is intended to mitigate the impact of an event, accelerate the recovery process, and assess the need for additional or alternative services. I also have worked with First Responder spouses to aid in navigating living with a first responder and the uniqueness of that relationship. (I am a spouse to a retired first responder, so this is an area I am passionate about)
Problem Solving: This is a broad, vague topic. Customized to each individual, I commonly see clients that believe they have a problem, can't see a way out, and want to learn how to cope and/or be solution-focused moving forward. Coaching will take time and commitment if you've been conditioned or have a long life of focusing on problems. However, we will work closely together to overcome that pattern. The more ready, open, and curious you are, the better.
Creativity and Innovation: I attract a tremendous amount of artists and creators. I love working with individuals with an inner creative side and want to dive deeper into that area of their life. There are a variety of blocks, from beliefs to time management to fear or what others think, so this is also unique for each individual and takes time and commitment, but more importantly, openness, willingness, and commitment to moving forward.
Successes and Accomplishments: This category can go in so many different ways. One that I commonly work with is turning something important to you into something that perhaps in the past you were externally motivated by to turning into something that's internally motivating. Every situation is unique. Often the belief is outside validation is the driving force, but that's the problem.
Overwhelming and Overthinking: Both kryptonite and will undoubtedly prevent you from living your best possible life. There's an easier way to live. It is a lifelong skill to learn. A life coach is necessary, with a maximum of two weeks between sessions. Learning to be at peace is a perishable skill. Support will ensure progress, insights, and a much freer, lighter, happier life.
Overcoming Challenges: We all have challenges. That's life. When you've got someone in your court invested in your desire to learn coping skills, see your full potential, and establish a solution-focused mindset, you'll live a more prosperous, richer, more meaningful life. Challenges are part of life, but if you view them as opportunities, as a means to learn and grow, you'll realize they help you rather than break you down. When you can get to a place, shift your stories and beliefs, and look back at every challenge in your life and see them as blessings, you've won. Time and commitment vary but again, something that takes time, dedication, and patience, but well worth it. Go from being a victim to a victor.
Health and well-being: I also have a tremendous amount of life experience and certifications. I approached my health and changed my lifestyle in the wrong way, made about every mistake, and learned from them. I help my clients avoid what I had to go through. I am certified through the CDC for type two diabetes prevention, multiple health coach certifications, personal training certification, and actively a bodybuilder. One of my favorite areas to coach. It's also an area that does take a deep commitment to, dropping a lot of diet mentality or programming learned from conditioning or google. Often there are many, many layers to this category.
De-cluttering: A cluttered environment is a cluttered mind. Many individuals I meet live in a chaotic mess and struggle to find their purpose, meaning, and where to begin. Having a thinking partner or worded differently: a life coach can be a way to navigate these questions. As with all things, the sessions should be consistent and consecutive, but ultimately the coach isn't doing the hard work. You are. Be prepared to roll up your sleeves.
Gratitude and Appreciation: Who doesn't want to be more grateful and appreciative? Most individuals are drifting through life, falling for all the marketing and stories about what they need or should be doing or having. All the while losing sight of gratitude and appreciation. Slowing down does take conscious effort, accountability, practice, and someone to help keep this front of mind. Coaching is great for this, and can provide dedicated time, planned, and spaced out to make it a habit.
Confidence: This one has been big and popular since COVID. So many people have reached out to me to help them be themselves again. Having two years of what some might call chaos or significant changes in their lives(jobs, routines, relationships, beliefs), along with a lot of fear. Some have isolated themselves from the things they enjoy. So many people have had significant changes in their beliefs, jobs, and relationships, so they seek to find their new tribe or circle of friends. We are social beings, and confidence is a great topic to get coaching on and a fun one to explore.
Perseverance: Coaching is fabulous for working on and creating strategies that help you forge ahead, especially when you are experiencing delay or difficulty.
Relationships: I debunk "relationships are hard ."They are if you believe they are; I understand how humans work in a simple, easy-to-understand way. We are more the same than different. Relationship coaching is a lot of fun and easy you'll be amazed. This does take time; each client and scenario is different. What I know about this category and all of them is that the more willing, curious, and seeing it as important to shift you are, the quicker the results.
Life coaching aims to help you overcome mental blocks you might have placed on yourself. So let's work together to overcome whatever the problem(s) or challenge(s). CLICK HERE
Coaching isn't a form of therapy or counseling. Life coaching doesn't look at your past, doesn't label you, diagnose or prescribe anything. Instead, coaching is a series of regular conversations over a period that provides the means to move you forward in life or a specific area of focus. I don't lock my clients into a contract; unlike other coaches, I have an agreement that spells out my promises.