1. What Does a Life Coach Do?

A life coach is an expert who can motivate you to take massive action and transform the areas of your life that you’re not satisfied with.

Coaching, in the way I see it for my clients, is about achieving concrete measurable results; whether in the pursuit and actualization of their goals or in the realization of their total well-being.

This includes communicating to clients the options, alternatives and possibilities available to them and to what extent they can use these resources to help them attain their goals. This also includes training them to use particular tools, tactics and techniques to circumvent and eventually overcome the obstacles they face on their self-growth journey. A life coach will help also them recognize the value of what they can already do and in what ways they can use those strengths and combine them with other strategies to make the breakthroughs they need and desire.

Simply put, the purpose of life coaching is to help bridge the gap between where you are and where you aspire to be.

2. What Should You Expect From a Life Coach

Not all coaches are born equal and neither do they operate within the same action-paradigm. A lot of life coaches these days tend to be “motivational” coaches. They will encourage you to believe in yourself and your abilities and they will push you to go after your goals. However, a lot of them don’t have effective or exact techniques to share with you in order to help you become independent of their “motivation” and eventually do it on your own. They function more like a source of accountability than a life coach – kind of like a probation officer.

I personally don’t find much value in these sorts of coaching programs. A pretty bad one can be more like a rah-rah session, and that’s not particularly helpful after a few of those sessions. An effective coaching program must be designed with the end result in mind, namely how can the coach help the client become independent. And to do so, the coach must be able to give clients emotional, philosophical and psychological ideas, concepts, tactics, techniques and strategies that the client can eventually employ by himself or herself after the coaching program. So the end result of coaching is to ultimately produce a client that is independently able to pursue his or her goals. That’s different from establishing a sort of dependency that keep the client wanting more “motivation.”

That’s not to say that “motivational coaches” are no good. They might be well suited for your needs if you’re looking for a good source of accountability.

Other things you should expect from a coach:

1. Objectivity

A coach must be able to deeply empathize with the client in order to provide accurate recommendations. This involves being able to perceive and comprehend the tension or the push-pull factors that affect the client in the context of his or her challenges. I personally meditate for about an hour before any consultation to ensure that I have placed myself in my client’s shoes and accurately grasped the emotional and intellectual dimensions of the problem. Only then, I can begin to say that I have an objective view of why my client is experiencing those challenges.

2. Customized Plan of Action

Based on your skills, talents and abilities, a coach will invite you to brainstorm ideas and strategies to create a plan of action. This is a critical step of the process because you want to produce a plan that’s tailored for your needs. There’s no pre-made plan of action that fits all sizes. Everyone is unique and each person needs a plan that can be supportive and challenging to effectively change the stubborn areas.

3. Effective Techniques

A life coach should provide you with exact tools and techniques that can help you work on your attitude and enhance performance. These tools and techniques are crucial for your success since they will help you address the following issues when they arise: What are you going to do when you don’t feel motivated to pursue your goals? How are you going to overcome the mental barriers that are stopping you from following through? What are the limiting beliefs and negative thoughts that you have about yourself and the process of change? What approaches are you going to use to neutralize them? That’s where the techniques come in handy.

4. Accountability

A life coach will ensure that you’re meeting your weekly and monthly goals in accordance with tasks you’ve set with your coach. It will also help you identify the issues and difficulties that arise as you’re working on your commitments in order to share them later with your coach for feedback and guidance. This will help clarify how you can tackle these issues and continue to make progress on your goal despite the nagging parts. You might also be expected to submit progress reports or goal-tracking reports to your coach depending on what works best for you.

However, coaching is not an investment everyone could or should make.

Improving oneself takes hard work.

3. The Magic Pill Mentality

Coaching will not work for you if you lack a genuine desire to work on yourself. It will not work for you if you believe you can transform an area of your life by simply thinking about it objectively. It will not work for you if you believe there is a “secret formula” that you can use, like swallowing a magic pill, and expect your life to finally change forever.

Working with a coach requires a serious investment on the part of the client. I personally advise clients to read a few of my articles and try some of the strategies that I recommend in there before signing up for a consultation session. I want them to recognize that changing an area takes focused dedication and a genuine desire to effect change. That’s why it pays to be a student of self-growth and personal development and I’ll gladly help you start this journey.

4. Prices

Coaching fees vary from coach to coach, but the standard minimum is $200 an hour. The price however can go as high as $5000 for a single session and, if you’re Tony Robbins, you can charge $1 million dollars a day (yes that’s one million dollars for a full day of one-on-one training). It really depends on your needs and the kind of coach you want to work with.

Some coaches, unfortunately, don’t have the requisite backgrounds. They have almost zero advanced training in professional or academic disciplines such as behavioral psychology, spirituality or philosophy and accordingly they lack the depth and perception to provide the necessary guidance to accelerate your learning curve and help you become an independent thinker and independent action taker.

5. When Should You Hire a Life Coach?

You should consider contacting a life coach only after you’ve exhausted the free resources available to you and you’re still unable to see the change you desire. Alternatively, you should consider contacting a coach if you’re looking to save time and you wish to accelerate the rate of progress you want to make in the pursuit of your goals.

For more information on my coaching and pricing email me at scully.elias@gmail.com