A life coach helps clarify your goals, identify the obstacles holding you back, and strategize ways to unlock your highest potential. The same way that professional athletes need high level training, enthusiastic support, and an honest and objective perspective in order to succeed, the same holds true for all of us.
So, what do life coaches do? Simply put, a life coach is a person that’s trained to help you thrive and live a life of passion and purpose; what I refer to as “Living on 10”!
Another benefit of having a life coach is to identify what balance looks like for you and define action steps to achieve more balance in your life. Life coaching programs are designed to help you develop winning habits in every area of your life that will maximize your potential, identify limiting beliefs that are holding you back (the stories we tell ourselves) and learn how to move beyond them to start living your life to the fullest. You and your life coach work one on one together each week to uncover your “why” and develop an action-based plan to achieve your outcomes, destroy your limiting beliefs, and have the life of your dreams, the one you were born to live.
Let’s uncover the three mistakes most make before hiring a coach
If you think the best way, or the only way for you to achieve your goals is to do it by yourself then you have the Lone Ranger Mentality. Do you believe that reaching out to someone who’s a professional, somehow indicates that you aren’t enough, that you are lacking? That it somehow means you’re incapable and not smart enough, strong enough or good enough, or simply not worthy of achieving more?
Well let me assure you, the people who invest in coaching are extremely capable, smart, strong and a whole lot more – we are already whole, perfect and complete as we are! They choose coaching because they are ready to accelerate their personal or professional lives and work with a professional coach who will enable them to achieve their goals faster, easier and with better results than they could on their own.
A coach will facilitate your self discovery, the identification of your goals and the prioritization of them, and develop sustainable habits to keep you moving forward. Your coach will help you create your action plan as well as prepare for and overcome any challenges you encounter along the way. Your coach will hold you accountable for taking consistent action toward the realization of your goals. Accountability is one of the greatest payoffs of coaching. It is so powerful because it can make all the difference in terms of you being a Goal Achiever instead of just a Goal Setter and someone who walks the walk instead of just talking the talk. Think of your coach as your success partner, whose reason for being is to help you get what you want quicker, easier and with better results than you could on your own.
If you’re thinking your life is good and you’re relatively satisfied, congratulations! That did not happen on its own. You have obviously done some fabulous work. You’ve already proven you’re the kind of person who proactively goes after what you want, and you get it. So why would you settle for anything less than great? Why would you settle for living in black and white when you could be living in technicolour? Do you really want to play it safe and stay comfortable? Playing it safe and staying comfortable can take you no further than “good”.
My clients are people who are already very successful, whether they see that at the beginning or not. Now that they’ve personally experienced the power of coaching they tell me that they realize how much less they were settling for, for themselves and their lives, in the past. They were settling for “good” when they could have been experiencing “great”. These clients also tell me that coaching has dramatically increased the quality of their lives in all areas, from increased sales to enhanced relationships and from better health to increased productivity. They feel, many for the very first time, that they are fully and vibrantly alive.
So, I challenge those of you who are settling. I challenge you to stop settling for “good”. I challenge you to go for GREAT and beyond, with life coaching.
Do you have dreams or desires that you’ve left unfulfilled because you can’t imagine bringing them to life without adding a lot more to your already jam-packed schedule? It may surprise you to know that coaching can enable you to be more, do more and have more, by working smarter instead of harder. Your coach will lead you through an efficient process. You’ll begin by getting crystal clear about what you do and do not want in your life. What’s great about that is that when you figure out the things in your life that you’re tolerating or doing just because you feel like you should, you can create a lot of extra space in your schedule to bring in the things that are truly meaningful to you. Next, you will develop an action plan that details what it’s going to take, the “what-by-when”, for you to reach your goals, outcomes and results you want. Finally, you will stay focused and on track by being accountable to your coach for taking consistent action and you will learn how to overcome any challenges that come up along the way.
Do you find yourself wishing other people were different: easier to get along with, more positive, more successful, trustworthy, or kind? Or do you find yourself thinking about how your life would be better if your circumstances were different if only you had a better job, more money, more time or more opportunity? Are you telling yourself that these external factors are responsible for what’s not working in your life or for preventing you from having what you want?
It can be very tempting to get caught up in this paradigm. But the reality is that if you are looking for or waiting for something outside of yourself to change and give you what you want, you will be waiting, and frustrated, for a very long time.
The reason for this is that you do not have control over anything outside of you. What you do have, though, is total control over yourself. You have total control over your thoughts, your actions and your results.
It is a fact that your circumstances will change when you make a committed decision to do the things that will move you forward in the direction of what you want to experience in your life, and then do them. Hiring a coach is one of the smartest things you can do to ensure you take control and create the reality you want to experience.
The Third Biggest Mistake – Wasting your time and money on stuff that doesn’t get you the results you want and is not ultimately fulfilling (speaking from personal experience here too!).
Let’s face it; there are an infinite number of things that you can spend your hard earned money and valuable time on these days. When you know you want things to be different or better it’s easy for you to waste your time and your money in one of two ways.
The first one is spending your time and money collecting information that comes in the form of books, software, seminars, reports or programs. You are collecting information that you believe can help you get what you want.
Now don’t get the wrong idea here, information is a great thing. We are big believers in books and programs being critical tools in helping you get where you want to go, but we want to make something very clear here.
Information alone will not get you results. You cannot expect that your sales will automatically increase just because you read the Guru of Sales’ latest book and you can’t assume that your monthly expenses will automatically organize themselves just because you purchased the newest expenses tracking software. You will get fulfilling results only by taking consistent action toward achieving your goals based on what you’ve learned from the information you’ve collected.
The second way you may be wasting your time and money is by acquiring and participating in things that have nothing to do with, and even go against, you having what you really want.
Have you ever allowed a month to go by where you indulge every food craving you had and did not exercise regularly, even though your deepest desire is to achieve and maintain a healthy body weight and lifestyle? Have you ever gone out and bought an expensive gadget you don’t really need or can’t really afford when what you truly desire is to feel successful and experience financial freedom?
If this sounds like you then you know what it’s like to be running on the hamster wheel of short-term gain, in the form of immediate gratification, leading you to long term pain because your life experiences don’t match up with what you really want!
It’s very important to realize that spending your time or money on things that give you immediate gratification but have nothing to do with your goals and values will always leave you feeling empty. Completely and totally empty and looking for the next quick fix.
Instead of wasting your time and money, why not invest in yourself in a way that will accelerate your personal and or professional development? Working with a coach on an ongoing basis is the most time and cost-effective investment you can make in yourself and your quality of life.
Your coach can teach you how to make the most of what you do have and how to do more with less. Your coach will hold you accountable for taking consistent, purposeful action towards achieving your goals.
By working with a coach, you will get crystal clear on what you really want, why you want it and how to get it. Having clarity takes the guesswork out of things. That way, you will be able to evaluate all future investment opportunities, and by that we mean any, and all, opportunities for you to spend your time or money, according to their ability to enable you to fulfill your purpose, your vision, your values and your goals.
The Second Biggest Mistake – Waiting for a “good” time to make a change or go after the things you really want in life.
Guess what, there is no good time. Life will always be busy. There will always be family and business obligations to attend to, errands to run, chores to do, TV programs to watch and people and projects that want your time, energy, and money. Your life will always be busy, and it will always get in the way of what you really want, if you let it.
Wondering what you can do about it? You can stop kidding yourself. Today. Stop kidding yourself that the perfect time is just around the corner or some time off in the future. Instead, decide to join forces with a professional coach who can teach you how to make the most of every moment starting right now.
Your coach will hold you accountable while keeping you focused and on track to achieving your goals no matter what life throws at you.
The Biggest Mistake – Telling yourself you can’t afford a coach (yep, I went down this road at first, but the Lone Ranger Mentality wasn’t working for me!).
The truth is that you can’t afford not to have one. Coaches are highly in demand these days because coaching has proven itself to be an extremely effective method for facilitating personal and professional development and fulfillment.
The word is out everywhere, it’s in the media, it’s in corporations and it’s in our communities. The word is out that coaching makes sense, and it really works. In studies that have been done on the impact of coaching, the results have consistently shown a return on investment of more than 100%. A study by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) discovered that 80% of people who hired a life coach reported an improvement in self-confidence, as an example. We are often consumed by our own opinions, life experiences, and way of thinking. A life coach can provide a new helpful perspective on things.
Coaching clients from all walks and areas of life, consistently report that it is the best money they ever spent because their investment in an ongoing coaching partnership enables them to achieve their outcomes. What’s even better is coaching enables them to achieve those quicker, easier and with better results. Now think about that for a moment. Think about what that means for you. Anything you want is available to you quicker, easier and with better results through the vehicle of coaching to develop habits that are sustainable.
If you are still unsure, consider this, it’s not enough for you to say you want things to be different. Just wanting something doesn’t make it so. You must make a decision and then take purposeful action toward what you want. When you put your money where your mouth is and invest in a coaching program, you demonstrate your commitment to achieving the thing(s) that you want and at the same time you cut yourself off from any possibility other than total success.