What is Life Coaching?

Posted on August 14, 2016 by Mohamed ElFatatry, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

Let’s start with “What is Coaching?”
Coaching is a one-to-one process for helping others to improve, grow and to get to a higher level of performance, by providing focused, constructive feedback, encouragement and raising awareness. Where the Coach uses a set of questioning techniques and tools to help the client get deep into the root cause of their problems and address the issues openly without judgement or criticism.
The coach will also work with the client to develop the strategies that can address the issue/situation, they together break-down those strategies into achievable and measurable short-term smaller goals. The client then start executing those actions and the coach role continues to support by monitoring the progress while being open to apply any necessary changes the client may need.

Coaching is a strategy and intervention which can develop individuals not only executives and future leaders. Many organisations invest in internal and external coaches as an effective developmental process for their employees.

The coaching partnership is central to the coaching intervention and needs to be guided by respect and a Code of Practice. Both the Coach and the client have to sign a client coaching agreement that clarifies the guidelines of the coaching relationships.

“A very common mistake people tend to fall in sometimes is to get confused between coaching, therapy and consulting. So let’s look into the difference between the three.”

Coaching vs. Therapy
Coaching has its theoretical roots in the discipline of psychology. Although coaching is not therapy, many coaches trained in psychology may adopt or borrow from various therapy models to use in workplace coaching. The purpose of therapy has been highlighted as a means to explore resistance and negative transference, whereas coaching aims to rephrase complaints into goals. Coaches are more inclined to encourage proactive behaviors to move the person forward out of their feelings and into action.

Coaching vs. Counselling
There is a different dynamic in the working relationship between a counselor or psychiatrist/psychotherapist and their patient than between a Life Coach and their client. The latter is much more a shared partnership with the coach being seen as a friend, partner, mentor, confidante etc.
Counseling will often look to the past to deal with issues. This can be time consuming, occasionally stressful for the client and by no means always necessary.
Life Coaching is more concerned with the future as it is solution and goal driven with the desire to help move the client as quickly as possible to where they want to be.
Counseling is not a quick fix and can last many months, even years.
Life Coaching can be a quick fix especially when working with fears and phobias, although they normally require the coach to have a working understanding of NLP and/or Hypnotherapy.

So What are the benefits of coaching?
I believe that everybody can benefit from coaching. I think a good evidence is that many of the successful people around the world do hire coaches, Everyone want to take advantage from that 1% improvement they can make in their lives. Researches have mapped extensive benefits of coaching for both organisations and individuals. The following list describes those benefits to individuals most frequently identified:
Increased self esteem
Reduced stress
Clarity and focus
Behavior change
Increased emotional intelligence
Work life balance
Career development
Improved leadership skills
Increased motivation
I hope the picture is clearer now that you understand what coaching is, what is the role of the coach & the core differences between coaching, therapy and counseling.

Please feel free to share your questions, reflections or comments. You can also contact me on my facebook page Mohamed ElFatatry Coaching and If you enjoyed this article, I’d be grateful if you’d help it spread by sharing it.