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Even Hospitals Are Offering a Professional Life Coach
I started hearing the term professional life coach or life skills coach about 11 years ago. It wasn’t a moment that I noted thinking, “Oh, that’s what I am” or “That’s what I want to do.” But I was and am big into personal development growth.
It was a regular day at the Mars Venus Institute (MVI) where my husband, Bart, and I were doing the tasks that we did daily. The phone rang - as it did many times every day. It was a woman named, Laura Whitworth, who told me she was associated with the Coaches Training Institute (CTI) in San Rafael, CA. She wanted to speak to John Gray about adding some kind of relationship piece to add to the training at CTI. (It never ended up happening with John Gray; however, CTI now offers Relationship Coach Training.)
The next time I remember hearing about what I often call “personal growth coaching” - another name for a professional life coach - was from an old friend who had recently hired a Life Coach. I was visiting her after having left my job at MVI. I was verbally ruminating about what I was going to do next in my life when suddenly she said, “You should go to Coaching school. Coaching what you do anyway!”
Hmm! I remembered that call from CTI and that we had a Coaching school right in the same county that I lived in. So I gave them a call, enrolled and the rest - as they say - is history.
Speaking of history, I did some research on the web to see if what I had learned about the history of Life Coach training was true. I had heard that Laura Whitworth and Thomas Leonard are both credited with the actual formalization of Coaching into the current profession it now is.
Be patient. The history information may take some time to load.
Click here for a brief history: Life Coaching.
So you can see that successful Life Coach training is steeped in psychological traditions but it isn’t therapy - which is not to say that therapeutic results don’t occur. They certainly do. I’ve included a link to a great article that talks about Life Coaching and the therapeutic results.
When you click on the link below these four paragraphs, you will be able to see what one of the founders of the Coaching profession says about what to talk to your Coach about. I'll give you my version:
What I Have Talked to My Coach About
I like to talk to a Coach when I am stuck - when I can't get on my little magic carpet and look at my life from a larger perspective. That's when I am finding my mind and my behavior not in line with how I want my life to go. An example: we have a couple of big issues going on in the lives of our children and grandchild. Important. Biggies.
Now I know that attention on the picky little negative details is not how to create the positive outcomes that I want. But sometimes my mind gets stuck and keeps going there just like my tongue goes to the place where the tooth is missing. So, I want my Coach to reiterate what happens when I do that negative picky thing and how the Law of Attraction works, etc. Very subtlety, of course.
Another example: sometimes current situations trigger childhood unresolved issues - particularly when I have made someone or someones into 'parents'. Any perceived rejection or abandonment on their part can easily send me into a tizzy and I want help out of my tizzy and assignments to help me stay out of there.
I’m guessing that most of the people that look at this site will be women. You might be one of them. Certainly men have Coaches. However, since I am a woman and my two Coaches have been women, the focus here might be more for a Life Coach for a woman - although I have two exceptions to that rule myself as a Coach.
I’ll take a stab at what might be different for me if I had a male Coach. I have recently become aware that although I have two sons and a great husband all of whom I have close and cherished relationships with, I am not experiencing a man’s life nor do I have a man’s body or brain. I cannot view the world from their perspective and experience. As a matter of fact, having no brothers and having had a lousy first marriage, when my current husband, Bart, and I were first together, I often “interviewed" him about a man’s perspective on things. Now it's not such a formal interview but I still seek the male perspectives he can give me.
That being said, I notice that I, and most of the women I run across, are more emotional and more easily connected to spirit or a spiritual perspective. (They may like to have a Spiritual Life Coach, which I am.) I have a different experience of the world just because I have different cultural biases, a different functioning body, I use makeup, I wear dresses and skirts not just pants, the media sees me differently, etc.
So I tend to have female clients with some notable exceptions like a single parent father with a child and a female ex- to deal with. I know that I am more drawn to talk about certain things with women – sex, feelings, even business perspectives.
I am not saying one is better than the other for a woman. Just different. I often have had some great short-term coaching from my husband and occasionally some other male Coaches but most likely I’d never hire a male coach for an on-going experience.
But that’s me.
You might want a woman as a Professional Life Coach because she will be able to understand where you are in your life better - having experience as a woman herself.
You might want a woman as a Coach because you want the freedom to speak about really intimate things that you might not feel comfortable talking to a man about.
So you might want a woman as a Coach because you share more in the way of perspectives and experience of life.
One Good Person As a personal Life Coaching kind of journey, writing my book, Once Upon a Time There Was You: Three Magic Secrets to Finding Your Real Self, was a kind of magical experience. That story is told on other pages on this site but while writing it, the awareness came that my life had become one that was more consciously self-directed then previously. What I mean by that is that increasingly I knew what was “up” for me and what I wanted to work on in order to uncover more and more of my authentic or Real Self.
As a personal Life Coaching kind of journey, writing my book,
Once Upon a Time There Was You: Three Magic Secrets to Finding Your Real Self, was a kind of magical experience. That story is told on other pages on this site but while writing it, the awareness came that my life had become one that was more consciously self-directed then previously. What I mean by that is that increasingly I knew what was “up” for me and what I wanted to work on in order to uncover more and more of my authentic or Real Self.
Before this time it was more like life happening to me rather than me being in charge. So working with my Coach who I had hired a month before I arrived in Las Vegas where my husband had a new consulting job, I knew that our relationship was more about healing past family issues and learning to fully trust myself then anything about accountability or a procrastination problem. I think of the kind of Coach that works mainly with those kinds of issues as more of a Spiritual Life Coach. Successful Life Coaching needs to be a good fit between the Coach and the goals of the client.
I wanted to be bolstered on expanding my spirituality and my view of both myself and my life.
Additionally, when I wrote the book and the Three Magic Secrets virtually popped out of it, (I originally thought the book was only going to be about Magic Secret #1 – Life Is a School) I realized that at the very beginning of my personal growth journey in 1980 it was the love, understanding, spiritual education, sense of humor and support provided my 12-Step sponsor (or Coach) that allowed me to heal much of my dysfunctional background. I realized that she was my Friend In-Deed (Do you get the double meaning? “Indeed” means “without a doubt” and “in-deed” means in the deed or the accomplished action.)
Guidelines for Looking for Life Skills or Finding a Professional Life Coach So what would be some guidelines in looking for your Coach? Well, first of all you need to know what it is you want to change about your life. Life Coaching is about changing – inner and outer. Once you have an idea about that, you might use the following as guiding principles in your search for your own brand of personal life coaching which I've adapted right from my book:
“When you find a buddy (Coach) you have found:
- 1. Someone who shares the joys and difficulties of growth along with you.
- 2. Someone who is totally interested in what you have to say.
- 3. Someone who will be able to see your growth and tell you what they see – many times before you are aware of it yourself.
- 4. Someone who will tell you if you are tricking yourself of are in denial.
- 5. Someone who will be able to tell you if you are being true to your Real Self.”(pg. 48 Once Upon a Time There Was You: Three Magic Secrets to Finding Your Real Self)
So keep the above in mind when considering personal Life Coaching.
Friend In-Deed
...is the use of a buddy in the form of a friend, a coach, a therapist, 12-Step sponsor or any combination of those people while you go through this process of uncovering your authentic self. It is fundamental that you gain support from and be completely honest with at least one other person, and, in so doing, your passage on the road to your Real Self will be greatly aided. Your Friend In-Deed will help you stay in integrity with yourself (pg. 40 Once Upon a Time There Was You: Three Magic Secrets to Finding Your Real Self)
My journey of transformation started in 1980. Since that time I have always had at least one Friend In-Deed. The tricks of the mind are such that I can easily be fooling myself or not seeing what is right in front of me to see. Or, look at it this way: since I only can look at life the way I look at it, it is wise for me to have some other or others who I trust, admire, respect and resonate with to show me another view.
My Friends In-Deed have supported me and helped me emotionally heal from everything from large financial loss and healing cancer to what now seems like silly stuff like squabbles with friends. It’s not that I always ask other people what to do but I do value and need other voices other than the ones in my head, other wisdom than my sometimes limited own.
I just did a little research on the internet and found Life Skills Coaching fees from $250 per month to $1200 per month. Most personal life coaches I know personally charge in the $350-$450 range with business and corporate coaches charging higher.
With my background in financial services and sales, I learned to talk about money quite comfortably. So I am very happy to discuss with you a subject which is often fraught with discomfort bringing up questions and thoughts like these:
- Is she really interested in me - or just the money?
- Is this really worth it?
- What will I get for my money with life skills coaching?
- Can I really afford this? (Which often means 'do I really deserve to focus this much on me?')
- Since I don't budget and I never seem to have any extra money, I don't think I can really do this.
(You may expect me to put my fees on this site. However, experience has shown me that you might not call because you will be intimidated by my fee and not feel you can ask if there is any alternative plan for us to come up with.)
I generally work with clients one hour per week with email in between, if desired. I do have a monthly rate and I am sometimes willing to be flexible particularly if I hear your real desire to move forward in your life.
Call me and let's talk about it. 310-264-5625
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