General Life
Coaching
My job as life coach is to help you create a life you love living. In accordance with my Wayfinder training, I do this by helping you tap into your own wisdom and way of knowing rather than imposing outsider advice upon you. Working with a coach is a lot like getting a personal trainer for your overall life experience and satisfaction. In the same way that a personal trainer helps relatively healthy people attain new levels of physical strength and vitality, a life coach helps people transition from lives that are sorta okay into ones that are joyful and deeply fulfilling.
I use a variety of tools in my practice, but one key element that we always come back to is the body. Your body, to be exact. In Wayfinder Life Coaching, we call this tool the Body Compass. We use the way your body physically reacts to ideas, thoughts, and potential courses of action to help navigate your path forward. If you think of your best, happiest, most joyful life as your own North Star, then consider the Body Compass to be an on-board navigational system you can use to continually orient yourself toward that North Star.
Coaching can equip you with a whole new set of tools and insights for navigating your journey through this life. It can bring an unparalleled clarity to your situation and your relationship to it, so that you can make good choices for how you want to move forward. There are many situations and reasons that might cause a person to seek coaching, and here are some examples:
Sometimes, life just throws you a curve ball and everything changes in ways you didn’t expect, and you’re just not sure what to do next. Or maybe you’re just feeling so stuck right now, but you’re not even sure what to change (let alone how to change it). Or maybe, you have some decisions ahead of you and you just don’t know what the best choice is for you. In any of these cases, coaching can bring clarity to the situation and illuminate your best next step.
Perhaps you have a dream for you life, and it’s killing you because you don’t believe it’s actually possible for you to achieve it. Or maybe you’ve ceased to allow the dreams, because of that pesky belief, and you’re miserable and flat because of it. Coaching can help you investigate these kind of beliefs so that you actually can move forward into a life that lights you up.
Maybe you have a dream, but it seems so impossibly outrageous that you don’t know where you would start if you wanted to make it happen. Coaching can help you identify the steps you need to take. Or maybe you have a goal you’ve been working on, but you never seem to be able to reach it. Coaching can help you recognize what’s really getting in your way, and identify how it is that your unique, most essential self really wants to go about accomplishing that goal.
What is it you truly desire? While I may not be a handsome rich devil that can magically pull that answer out of you, I can still help you find it. If you have the nagging sense that something is missing, or that there should be more to your life, I believe you’re right. Coaching takes a deep dive into your true self to uncover what is really meaningful to you in this life, and helps you move forward to fill in those gaps for what’s missing.
While coaching and mental health therapies do have some overlaps, they are distinctly different fields. Remember the analogy from earlier, where the life coach is like a personal trainer? If we continue that metaphor, we see that the psychotherapist is like the doctor. When you’re not well, you need to see a doctor (psychotherapist); when you’re okay but want to be doing awesome, you see a personal trainer (life coach). Coaches and therapists have different educational backgrounds, just like the personal trainers and doctors. We have some overlap in our knowledge and skills, but our main areas of expertise lie at different ends of the health and happiness spectrum.
Coaching can be a good partner to psychotherapy for some clients, but it is certainly not a replacement. If you are in need of clinical therapy, it is important that you get it. If you are currently in therapy but doing well enough that you’re ready to consider adding a new element, discuss this with your therapist. If the two of you agree that it’s time, by all means, begin exploring what coaching has to offer!
I offer free, 30-minute discovery calls to help us both assess this. In general, if you are dealing with dissatisfaction, facing uncertainty, or just feeling stuck overall, it’s a great time to work with a life coach! You should also know that coaching requires you to be willing to go through some honest inquiry about yourself and your life. It requires that you have a hunger for something to be different, even if you don’t yet know what that something is or what “different” looks like.
It’s also important that you be in a state of mental and emotional health such that you can receive the benefits of coaching. See above for the difference in the professions and relevant considerations.
Finding the right fit is as important to me as a coach as it is to you as a client! Part of what we do during my free, 30-minute discovery calls is get a feel for each other and determine whether we might be a good coach-client match.
If the thought of exploring the option to work with me brings you a sense of excitement, delight, hope, lightness, expansiveness – in short, if making this one step feels like freedom to you in any way – heed that feeling. Follow your own sense freedom and make the call. This is you first step toward your North Star. The next step is after that is yet to be discovered, and that’s okay – we can uncover it together.
