Should you be hitching a ride on this bandwagon, or is it a waste of time and money? A popular newspaper asked a life coach to explain the process and its benefits.

What is life coaching?

Life coaching is essentially about furthering your career by developing yourself. It’s about achieving your full potential with the help of a life coach – someone with the proper training, credentials and life experience to help you.

“Life coaching can be distinguished from, for example, psychological intervention by virtue of being generative rather than remedial,” says life strategist Dr Kay Brugge. “The point of departure is that the coachee is a well-functioning individual; the objective being to amplify their strengths rather than remedy their weaknesses.”

According to Brugge, both short and long-term goals can be defined during coaching sessions:  

Short-term goals may include stress management and building emotional intelligence skills to help the coachee to cope more effectively with daily life and work demands and to increase their resilience.

Longer-term goals could be to ensure that the person being coached, the “coachee”, lives a life characterised by choice and a prospective orientation, rather than living up to their perceptions of other people’s expectations or to compensate for limiting life-scripts.  Here, the coaching process could focus on guiding the coachee to review their values and belief systems. Any changes to limiting belief systems in particular can have a dramatic cascading effect on behaviour, unlock the coachee’s true potential, lead to greater contentment and a stronger sense of coherence – both mentally and spiritually.

Life coaching can be applied to both individual and group settings, and usually takes place in a confidential, non-threatening environment.

“Experiential learning is particularly strong in group settings, with the participants being able to apply and practise their newly learnt skills, such as emotional intelligence or coaching others,” Brugge says.

The process in practical terms

Are you a candidate for life coaching? If you want to live a more fulfilled and harmonious life, you already fit the profile. 

“Practically, the process will differ from coach to coach, but it is probably important to define tangible outcomes, which are to indicate a change from the coachee’s ‘current state’ (mentally, emotionally and behaviourally) to a ‘desired state’,” Brugge, who has post-graduate qualifications in psychology and neuro-psychology, says.

He refers to a process of “Testing, Operating, Testing and Exiting” (”TOTE”), which has its roots in neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), to explain the step-by-step approach that can be used in coaching.

“The coach and coachee constantly determine (test and re-test) whether and how the gap between ‘desired’ and ‘current state’ is narrowing.  Once the desired state has been attained, coaching can be considered successful,” Brugge says.

The life coaching process shouldn’t be rushed, as the full impact and benefits may only become clear at a later stage.  

“The objective is to make a progression of learning through awareness creation from being ‘unconsciously incompetent’, to ‘consciously incompetent’, to ‘consciously competent’, and finally, ‘unconsciously competent’. The latter is evident from dealing in a novel manner with previously seemingly insurmountable challenges, but not really knowing how this change has come about,” says Brugge.       

While setting outcomes or indicators for change is important, allowing time for these changes to emerge is just as critical, Brugge says. In time, as the coach and coachee get to know each other better, the conversation becomes more valuable and yields important outcomes.

The coachee should also be ready for the process and up for the challenge. Small interventions can have a dramatic effect if the right conditions for change already exist.  As the old adage, goes: “If the student is ready, the teacher will appear”.

Often, coachees operate outside their comfort zones when they approach a coach. This would then be an ideal opportunity for change, Brugge notes, and would also be the factor that makes the intervention more effective, compared to when the coachee is still in his or her comfort zone. 

Will it set you apart in the workplace?

If done properly, life coaching can ensure that an employee functions better under stress and remains focused in difficult circumstances. Life coaching can also enable a leader to make unpopular decisions to the benefit of his company.

Better motivated individuals, with positive belief systems and a clear purpose and who are self-aware, can manage their own emotions and those of others as they happen, Brugge says.

“Such employees/leaders can be a remarkable asset to their companies.”

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