THE POWER AND MAGIC OF LIFE COACHING
Where, oh where to begin? Coaching – a concise eight letter word with an enormous wealth of connotations!
How to define what this word means? It’s something different to everyone and has different outcomes for everyone. But what is clear and obvious is that coaching works!
I have been involved with coaching for many years and have been a professional life coach for a few of those! To say it has transformed my outlook would be an understatement, not only in terms of my personal focus and life shift, but in my perception and understanding of how others ‘tick’.
It is an eye-opening vocation – for I truly believe that coaching is a vocation, not merely a job. It has given me lucidity of thought and made me endlessly question where I, and of course, others are coming from in life. This does not make it an exact science, far from it – it is an intuitive process, enhanced by experience and the truly outstanding coaches, I believe for all their learning and training draw from life experience and their innate intuition.
I am a journalist as well as a Life Coach and words are my tools of the trade. They come naturally and easily to me, but that does not detract from the fact that I still have to be careful with them. They can hurt, they can be detrimental, can negatively affect a situation or they can help to empower, positively change a life, enable someone to become who they truly want to be. Powerful indeed!
The power of words in coaching is immeasurable. I recently attended a seminar where the speaker, a man of many years’ coaching experience told us that the most gruelling – and consequently most outstanding – coaching session of his life (he being coached) was from being asked just TWO questions, over and over until he felt he could have throttled his coach!
These were the questions: ‘What do you want me to do (as your coach)?’, and when answered, the follow up question was, ‘What would happen then?’ The process was drilling down, down, down…And the result - the coach lived to tell the tale and the client was completely amazed at his own ability to answer and solve his own ‘problems’ – it very nearly amounted to self-coaching!! But with so few words from the Life Coach…
I truly believe that simplicity of Life Coaching is paramount. We all have our learning, our methods, our fallbacks, but the bottom line is who we, as a coach, are becoming as a person ourselves in our personal journey through life. It is up to the coach to be themself, for this is their most amazing gift and through listening and encouragement to allow the client to tell their story, to use their own words and to arrive where they would like to be having had a great (but challenging, no doubt!) journey, with the minimum of intrusion.
Everyone has a story; it’s how we use that story that counts. The story is not the truth; it is the client’s truth, often creating great emotion. It can delay progress and promote a feeling of disappointment, so it is up to the coach to try to encourage the client to rewrite their story, to recreate the story and to take command of the moment, their actions and feelings.
As a Life Coach it is important to pay complete attention, to listen to the client and find out where the story (the ‘words’ we repeatedly tell ourselves) is coming from and how is it serving the client, or not. There lies the magic of coaching! There are six stories – our past stories which can either give energy or sap our energy; present stories, either positive or negative and future stories. Taking a past story and positioning it in the wrong place can lead to straying off the path, but rewriting it can imbue it with hope and energy. The energy holding the client back in one story will propel them forwards in another.
Take the elastic band analogy. An elastic band stretched has energy going all ways. When you let it go you don’t know in which direction it will fly. So, it is that energy and direction that Life Coaches need to harness and identify, encouraging the client to let go and to use those powerful and positive forces to their benefit rather than their detriment. We all have a choice and it is up the Life Coach to establish exactly where the story’s at!
I was a Samaritan at one time in my life and here I truly learnt the art of not only listening, but of hearing people’s stories. Some would be repeated daily like a mantra, imprisoning the person within the walls of their story: ‘I’ve said it often enough, told myself the same thing over and over, therefore it must be true.’ But use the simple skill of encouraging someone to rewrite the story, let it go and the new reality hits home.
The positive power of coaching, either face to face, on the telephone (or Skype) or by Coaching Interactive is immeasurable, used in the correct way. It is up to the coach to be his or herself, to truly listen to the client, not muddle the thinking with ‘strategies’, there lies the risk of not giving the client your full attention, not hearing what they are saying. You are not in the moment, but constantly projecting into the future.
The power and magic of Life Coaching, the power and magic of words, simply chosen and well placed, whether they be spoken or written (and often written is even more powerful as people have the chance to change them, reread, inwardly digest at leisure) is great indeed and should never be underestimated. Nor should the ability to listen, to hear what is being said (and hearing what is NOT being said), to ‘read between the lines’ and thus to react with empathy and understanding to encourage a dawn of realisation and move towards that life changing moment.
Annie Watsham
Personal Success Coach
Events Manager
MAC
01580 720559
07970 413492
Helpful Kent Life Coaching links
lifecoaching@anniewatsham.com / interactivecoach@anniewatsham.com
skype: annie.watsham
