Life Coaching and Mentoring

Coaching and Mentoring

The popularity of this, more than almost any other 'soft skills' training has grown in recent years.

Why this rise?

To start, people are looking to life coaches to help them create a better work-life balance.

Bringing It All Together

But it's even more than that.

People who are seeking:

Career Coaching
Executive Coaching
Management Coaching
Counselling
Therapy
Lifestyle changes
Individual personal coaching

are increasingly turning to life coaches to bring together all the disparate areas of their lives.

The Need To Feel More Effective

There are people seeking to:

Be more effective
Be more successful
Increase their performance at work
Who know they need or want to change

There are scores of reasons for people to pursue life coaching.

Objective View

The most important reason why life coaching can make a huge difference is that someone outside your life can take an unbiased completely objective view and through that, see things you either haven't noticed or that never occurred to you or that you didn't think was possible.

Alongside the objectivity, a life coach should give you that extra boost of confidence that can make putting it all into practice possible.

Using A Coach

So if you've decided that getting a life coach is for you, here are some things to look out for:

You have to like and respect them
They need to have a proven track record
They need to have done lots of different things in their own life
If they have a counselling or psychotherapy background it helps
Older and wiser is a good formula
They aren't miracle workers but sometimes it could feel like it
You need to feel you are making progress right from the first session
You shouldn't have to sign up for masses of sessions

Being A Coach

The best life coaches are people who have actually had some life!

We get approached on an ongoing basis by people wanting to train as life coaches.

Training as a life coach isn't as straightforward as some organisations would lead you to believe.

Do these many courses and ta-da! you're a life coach.

Life Experience

Ok, OK, we're being a little bit glib here, but as far as we're concerned, you have to have a whole raft of skills already before you even think of training as a life coach.

You need to be doing it. Whatever 'it' is, you've got to be demonstrating that you practise what you preach.

You need to have a whole string of 'tries' under your belt. Not successes; tries.

Things you've had a go at.

Career changes, life changes, experiments, trying new things, learning and developing all the time.

Counselling And Therapy

It helps to have a counselling or psychotherapy background because sure as damn it, people's deeper issues will arise when looking at life changes.

Trying to give someone coaching when they've come up against a life pattern isn't going to work if you don't have the skills to get them through the rocky patches.

Creativity

Creativity is a must.

Having the ability to look at situations with new eyes and coming up with unusual and yet appropriate options is a terrific skill to possess.

Confidence

A toolkit of confidence-boosting goodies.

People often don't or won't or can't change their lives because they don't have the confidence to do so.

A life coach's job is to instil and develop other people's confidence, so they feel good about trying new things.

Therefore, you have to be able to deal with fears, stuckness, embarrassment, humiliation avoidance; all the things that get in the way of people moving forward.

Special Talent

Impact Factory doesn't really run courses on life coaching.

We aren't some intensive life coaching academy that gives certificates and qualifications to loads of people.

As a matter of fact, we think that being a really good life coach is a very special talent and not many people do it well.

The Best Life Coaches

What we've noticed recently, is that people are fed up with their own jobs and life, look around for something interesting to do, and settle on life coaching.

Nothing wrong with that, you say, and we agree to a certain extent.

However, we think the best life coaches are those who seem to have evolved into them as a culmination of years of accumulating experience and skills and a few hard knocks along the way.