You have a problem. You want help with that problem, but you don’t feel like you can go to a friend or family member.
You have a goal. But you aren’t sure if it’s realistic, or you aren’t sure how to reach that goal. You know what you want but you don’t know how to get there.
You’ve heard of this thing called a life coach, but you aren’t sure if they can help you. How do you know? Can they?
I’m here to tell you that they probably can help you! First, let me tell you what a life coach is, and then I can tell how having a life coach can change your life.
What a Life Coach IS:
- Someone who can help you take your life from good to great
- Someone who holds space for you in order to help you discover your thinking and how your mind works
- Someone who can help you uncover limiting beliefs you have about yourself
- Someone who can help you uncover what you are making your problems mean, and how to direct your thoughts to a new way of thinking that serves you
- Someone who can help you discover your passions and goals
- Someone who can help you create any desired result in your life. Yes, really!
- Someone who can help you experience emotion more deeply and harness this power to move you forward
- Someone who can help you learn how to love all the humans – including yourself and the difficult people in your life – unconditionally
What A Life Coach is NOT
- A registered therapist
- Someone who can help you uncover or treat trauma
- Someone who will help you process past pain. We work with how the past might make you feel in the present and future, but we do not guide you or help you to relieve painful experiences in the past
- Someone able to help manage any type of mental illness
- Here to give advice or solve any problem – YOU have the power, we just help you to uncover it
So- What are 10 Reasons to Hire a Coach?
1. Find Freedom from Your Limiting Beliefs
Often, when we have a problem that we want to solve, we believe that the problem itself is outside of us. We want to believe that if only they would behave like x, or I would get x, that we would feel better.
Instead, our feelings are entirely driven by our thoughts.
A belief is just a thought that has been thought so many times, it is now automatic. We don’t really question it. We have deeply rooted, and often unconscious, belief systems that make it sometimes nearly impossibles to overcome our limiting thoughts in order to reach our goal.
A Life Coach can help you uncovre what these limiting beliefs are. They help you learn how your brain works, so that you are able to know why you do what you do. They give you the tools to decide if and how you want to change it.
2. Learn How to truly experience the range of human emotions
Most of us are socialized to not want to experience negative emotion. As children we are often told to not speak up because it might hurt someone else’s feelings. Or we learn that if we are sad, we can do x, y or z to feel better.
Feelings such as happiness, excitement, and commitment have been labeled for us as “good,” while others such as fear, anger and anxiety have been labeled as “bad.”
As a result, most of us only truly experience a very small range of emotion. We cannot selectively numb and only feel positive emotion. To avoid feeling extrememly “bad” emotions (such as panic, terror, devastation), we unintentionally also mute extremely positive emotions (such as euphoria and passion).
To better explain this, look at the image below. If feelings were a range (and to continue with the association of positive v. negative emotions for the sake of explanation here) most of us live between -2 and 2 on the range of human emotion. If we go below a -2 then we start to panic and/or think something has gone wrong. Most of us believe that we “shouldn’t” or “can’t” feel this way. Others of us think that if we think “down there” we might get stuck and will never be able to claw our way out.
The problem is that we are not able to selectively numb our emotions. What I mean by this is that we can’t experience the 10 of true bliss without also being able to experience the -10 of pure terror.
In order to truly experience the joys of life, we also have to learn how to safely experience the negative emotions. In order to cope with negative feelings, we also have to learn how to sit with them rather than avoid them or try to escape from them.
A life coach will help you do this in a very simple and easy way that is safe for both your mind and your nervous system. Don’t worry, we aren’t going to intentionally elicit feelings of terror or do any kind of exposure therapy – that is not what I am talking about here! Rather, they will help you know how to describe your feelings in your body and decide what we want to make them mean. Once you can do that, you can begin to expand out of the -2 to 2 range in a way that allows you to feel in control.
3. Feel lasting Self-Confidence
Most of us look to our past to decide what we are capable of creating in our future. Therefore, we are sometimes scared to really dream big and think about a grand future for ourselves. We think of this as realistic. However, this is not what creates self-confidence!
A coach can help you learn how to let go of using your past as a way to define who you are in the present, and most importantly who you will become in the future. You will learn how to accept and love yourself now AND still have big dreams and goals for your future.
Once you can do that, then you will be able to really step into your power as a truly self-confident person. Self-confidence comes from believing in yourself no matter what. Even if you have no evidence to support it.
Want more of this? Want to be unstoppable?! Sign up for my free Self-Confidence 101 Guide
4. Create Lasting Results in Your Life
This is not the place to come if you want a quick fix or want to be told how to do something. A life coach helps you learn how to think. When you can learn how to control your thinking then everything changes. And you have the power to choose again and again and again.
You will have little wins and big shifts. You will create the dream life that you want and also learn how to be less of an asshole to yourself. Learn how to tolerate that coworker you want to strangle and also lose 50 pounds. The circumstances don’t matter and the possibilities are endless.
Whatever your goal is- and whatever you just haven’t given yourself permission to even imagine yet! – the key will be to know your thoughts, feel your feelings and then decide ON PURPOSE what you want to be thinking, feeling and doing. This is the key to lasting results.
5. Create work-life harmony
Have you ever thought about your relationship with time? Did you even know you had one?
Do you sometimes think or say “there just isn’t enough time!” Yeah – that’s indicative of your relationship with time. A life coach will help you uncover your thoughts about time and your thoughts about your abilities to “have it all.”
You will learn how to create time in your life for both work and play (if that’s what you want!) by changing your beliefs about what you can and cannot do in a set period of time in your life.
Learn how to manage all of your tasks at home and at work with ease and actually hustle LESS. I quit my job, moved across the country, started a new job and started a business in the span of 8 weeks and I feel as though I hustle less and enjoy my freetime more than I ever have before. And ironically, there are more things on my to-do list than ever before!
Learn that your job, family, and to-do’s don’t have to change in order for you to feel better about your life.
6. Learn how your brain works
Have you ever wondered why you said a certain thing? Or why you think a certain way? Well, we certainly aren’t neurologists, but we can help you learn how your brain processes thoughts and feelings. More importantly, a life coach can show you how to harness that knowledge to create the life of your dreams.
Your thoughts are the gateway to literally anything you want in life. Learning how to manage your thinking and cultivate the thoughts and feelings that will best serve you, will help you 10x your life in ways that you haven’t even thought about yet.
A surprising result I created by learning this information, was being able to let go of judgment. When you know why you are wired the way you are, it helps you to judge yourself less and actually understand, with compassion, that your brain is truly just trying to help you.
7. Create a self-care practice that is lasting
You will learn how to cultivate habits that will last over time (see my blog post about that in more depth here!). Part of this practice can be creating routines around your self care – and what that looks like specifically for you!
It also helps you in literally caring for yourself in a more loving manner. Again, we aren’t even aware of most of our thoughts throughout the day, including the thoughts we have about and toward ourselves. Once we become aware of them, we can intentionally choose more caring and loving thoughts. We improve our relationship with ourselves. That is the beginning of the best possible self-care available to you.
8. Live your life from your future, not your past.
This is critical because if you never try for something you’ve never done before, then you will never evolve. Learn to have confidence in your results before you ever even have them. How do you do that? You become the person with the results before you ever get there.
Wait. What?
Before you ever achieve a result, you become that person first. Think of it through the lens of weight loss. You don’t lose weight by wishing it upon yourself. You decide to make healthy choices in your life and love your body. Then you lovingly carry out those choices. You start to think in a certain way which causes you to act in a way that leads to weight loss. So before you ever lose all of the weight, you change who you are because you change how you think in order to create the results you want.
You create massive quantities of confidence in yourself and your future before you ever achieve results. You create tremendous amounts of self-confidence. People will see the shift in you and start to believe in you too. I promise.
Again – if you’re interested in creating more self-confidence for yourself, check out my freebie below!
9. Improve your relationships
One thing that you will learn is how to love all humans. Because the truth is, we are all doing our best on this earth. But we aren’t always perfect. And we are made to be judgy. It’s ok, don’t beat yourself up for it. But wouldn’t the world and your life be a better place if you could approach your situation with love and compassion?
You will learn how to do this. You will create boundaries where appropriate, from a place of love and not anger. You will decide on purpose how you want to feel about the people in your life. You will practice radical self-love.
You will learn how to give yourself all of the things you need so that the people in your life are there to be loved, not to give you the things you think you need from others in order to feel loved.
You will transform your relationship with yourself and the people in your life, if that is what you choose. And I promise you, it will be for the best.
10. Help get un-stuck
All of this information is great, I promise ;). And I will and can provide lots of free information. And some of you will gobble it up and then still not get anywhere. That is because your brain and your body will become overwhelmed with information. And then what? Many of you will get stuck and that is where you will give up.
Your brain has so many thoughts per day and the real secret to this is… most of those thoughts are just stories that you are telling yourself. They feel like facts. You will argue that they are facts. But they are not. They wouldn’t stand up in a court of law and not everyone would agree with them.
You will learn how to separate facts from stories that you tell yourself. And the best part of this is that you get to change the narrative. You get to decide what story you want to tell instead.
You will learn how to act without indulging in overwhelm. You will learn how to keep taking steps forward even when you feel stuck. And you will learn that being stuck- it’s just a story you’re telling yourself.
So – should I hire a life coach?
Anything you truly desire is completely in your power and your reach. A Life Coach (whether someone that you work with 1:1, are in a group program, or are in a membership) can really demonstrate for you the ways in which you might be holding yourself back and not even know it. They can also help you see parts of your mind that you have never explored and discover passions and a future that excites you.
But the best thing that a Life Coach provides is showing you that YOU have all of the power and YOU have all of the answers. They help you tap into that power and then support you while you blow your life up in the most incredible ways.
So – should you hire a life coach? While I cannot answer that for you, just know that my life has been completely and utterly transformed because of my committment to myself and because of the work I have done since investing in myself. I challenge you to open yourself up to the possibility that just maybe that life you’ve always wanted turly IS possible.
