The personal coaching industry is growing in the United States, and in 2018, it surpassed the $1 billion thresholds. There are many contributing factors to this, but one reason you can’t overlook is the result.
Myriad benefits of life coaching can help improve your personal and professional life. In this article, we’ll cover 10 of the most common benefits. But we’ll start with building a foundational understanding of what life coaching is.
Types of Benefits of Life Coaching
Before we can get into the benefits of coaching, it’s important to know that a life coach can work in different settings.
They can coach clients on an individual basis, which often costs the client more but provides more direct attention and focus. They can coach in group settings, or coaching classes, which is less costly to the client because she shares the coach’s attention with group mates.
Alongside these environments, clients can do some self-coaching. This supplements the individual or group coaching sessions and helps the client feel more self-sufficient over time.
Within these three settings, there are two overall types of life coaching: personal and professional. Often, these can intersect and overlap, but it’s important for clients and coaches to be on the same page regarding the main goals in these two spheres.
With an understanding of the various types of coaching, let’s look now at the benefits of leadership and life coaching.
1. Improve Self-Reliance
The ability to know you can trust yourself to handle a challenge can be a boon. After all, there are going to be times when a coach and client aren’t together. Clients have to be able to fend for themselves more and more.
A good life coach will help a client become more self-reliant by providing tools, techniques, and support to increase a client’s confidence and ability to manage their own lives and make decisions.
2. Improve Accountability
One of the steps to becoming self-reliant is to become accountable. Building accountability involves setting attainable goals and taking realistic steps to meet them. It involves following guidelines.
Accountability helps clients learn to trust that they can get the job done.
3. Communicate More Effectively
Anyone who’s ever spent time with a toddler knows how frustrating it is when communication breaks down. A lack of effective communication, for toddlers, is a leading cause of tantrums.
But those frustrations can mount in adults too, and while the result may not be throwing yourself on the floor to kick and scream, that doesn’t negate those frustrations. Life coaches can help clients learn to communicate more effectively.
4. Improve Motivation
There are two ways we motivate: extrinsically and intrinsically. Extrinsic motivation is something like a salary. You do your job and you get a reward from an external source: money.
Intrinsic motivation is when you do something because it brings you joy or pride. It makes you feel good about yourself. This fosters empowerment.
A good life coach will help clients sniff out ways to intrinsically motivate, and thus empower themselves.
5. Improve Problem Solving Skills
Life coaches can help clients think outside the box to solve the hurdles that invariably crop up in personal and professional spheres.
How do you solve a discrepancy with your significant other? What should you do when you need more money from your work? Life coaches can help clients dissect problems in order to find ways not just to avoid them, but to solve them.
6. Improve Creativity and Flexibility
When was the last time you were told to play with ideas? Creativity stems from–and creates–flexibility that can then lead to new ideas.
When we’re more creative and less stubborn, we can think at our best.
7. Improve Health
Life coaches can help clients improve diet and exercise, thus improving physical health. It’s hard to be happy if you’re unhealthy, in and out of doctors’ offices, on and off medications.
While a life coach may focus largely on cognitive coaching and emotions, physical health is important too.
8. Improve Relationships
Sometimes we need a little extra help in dealing with other people in our lives. Maybe a colleague is making work difficult, or we’re having problems in a romantic, family, or friend situation.
A life coach has the objectivity, the distance, to help find a path from negative feelings to positive ones.
9. Overcome Negative Thinking
Through cognitive behavior therapy–where clients talk about what’s bothering them in a conversation guided by a life coach–clients can identify the situations that trigger negative thinking.
Negative thinking is counterproductive to empowerment, success, and happiness. In order to achieve those tangible and intangible goals, clients have to learn to think positively.
Doing so alone can be a long and arduous process though. That’s why having a life coach can help–it’s someone to guide the way instead of having to fumble around in the dark by yourself.
10. ID and Maximize Strengths
Life coaches understand that everyone has strengths they can rely on to improve their lives and deal with problems as they arise. They have the skills to draw these strengths out of clients’ subconscious and into their conscious thought.
Clients can learn they can rely on those strengths and maximize them to bolster areas for improvement in their lives.
Crossing the Finish Line
Whether you want to become a life coach or work with a life coach, understanding the benefits of life coaching can help you find the right situation for you. With these benefits, you can improve your personal and professional life, or help others do the same.
Maybe you’ll start out being coached and decide then to coach others. Leadership can be infectious in that positive way.
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