What is Life Coaching?

WHAT IS A LIFE COACH?

I am writing this because when I tell people that I am a Life Coach, either they have no idea what I am talking about or they are very wrong about what I do. But, it is not really their fault because the term Life Coach is misleading. It sounds like, by calling myself a Life Coach, that I am claiming to be in some position to tell other people how to live their lives, which I am not. I think it is this misconception that leads to Life Coaches being ridiculed more than what we actually do. It seem like the prevailing idea of what a Life Coach is, is someone that believes in manifesting things out of thin air, and I know there is some of that out there but I at least hope that it is only a tiny minority of Life Coaches. By reading this, you will see that I am the very opposite to anyone that is spiritually manifesting anything and the process I use is logical cause and effect. Hopefully, you will also see that I am more than capable of helping people. Finally, I will also detail my exact process here so that even if you do not believe I can help you, you can help yourself – for free.

This is my process from start to finish.

Firstly, before anybody pays for my services, I give them a free introduction that takes about 45 minutes. During this session we will establish what goals people want to work towards and identify how to get started. Usually people will work towards between four and eight goals and sometimes they have already started with some of them. I will create a fake client to explain my process and for ease of description, lets pretend that they are starting from scratch with all of their goals. Lets call this person Mr A.

When Mr A shows an interest in Life Coaching, I will contact them and agree a time for their free introductory session. Today is Friday, so lets say we set this up for next Friday. When this is agreed, I will email Mr A to confirm the time and ask them to think of at least three goals that they want to discuss in the session. Ideally Mr A will email them to me beforehand, but this is not essential. The on Friday, I will call Mr A and the goal of this session is to prove to him that my services will help him to be more productive, successful and happy. For this example, I will say that Mr A identifies four goals. They are to become the best salesperson in his company, start a side business as a Personal Trainer, to write a book about dieting and to raise 100k for charity. Most of these things I have never personally done and have no expertise in but I can still help Mr A. The first thing I do is create a spreadsheet for Mr A. It will look like this.

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This will act as the basis for everything we talk about. The cover page Identifies all targets that Mr A is working towards – and he can add to them at any time. There is also a tab for each individual target, for notes and for action plans.

Now that we have something to work towards, we go through each target individually. When doing this, we need to discuss the current circumstances vs the target and identify the next steps and put that onto the spreadsheet. Like so…

During this conversation, we will work together to figure out what Mr A could do immediately that would be a good step towards the overall goal. Then we put that next step into an action plan. This way the goal of becoming the best salesperson is broken down into one small step. This will be helpful because that is something that can be achieved quickly and is a step in the right direction. Then you need to do this for each individual goal.

Once Mr A and I have worked though all of the individual goals and created the action plan. The completed action plan will look like this…

So by the end of the introductory session, Mr A and I will have spent time discussing all of his individual goals and I will send him an action plan that is designed to be completed within one week. At this point, he can decide that he has got something for free and he can go on to complete the action plan and not come back to me. The downside to this is that if you do not come back to me or someone else, in one week – there is no accountability to the action plan. Do not get me wrong, some people are fantastic at keeping themselves accountable but in my experience this is rare. Think of how many people, including yourself, have said they were going to do something and never did. That is because there is no accountability.

Hopefully Mr A will decide to continue with sessions. If so, we would schedule a time that suits him. It is best to make sure the time is consistent, for example, every Monday at 11am. This way it is always on the schedule. Going forward, the sessions are slightly different to the introductory session because I am already familiar with your goals and you have had your first action plan. The rest of the sessions look like this…

The first thing to do is look at the last weeks action plan and make sure Mr A has done everything that was on it. The best part about breaking your goals down into smaller and more manageable steps is not that you will do them (although that is great), but it is that you will likely do more that what you said you would. Let’s take the example of contacting 10 people to see if they would like to discuss their experience with the Keto diet for a book – it is highly likely that one of those people will have agreed to do it and probably scheduled the conversation. So instead of having a huge goal of writing and selling a book that is so difficult to achieve that it is hard to even begin, you have overachieved on a small manageable goal that you will look back on as a huge step towards your overall goal.

You can check to see if this works right now. I have no interest in writing a diet book and you probably don’t either but that does not matter. Let’s pretend. Take the following message;

“Hey, I hope you don’t mind the random message but I saw your post about the Keto diet. I am actually writing a book about Keto and would like to speak to some real people that have tried it. Would you be open to giving me some feedback on the diet, good or bad?”

Send that message to 10 people that have posted anything about the Keto diet in the last month. Make sure the people are not verified. Let me know if anyone responds. You can tell them this was an experiment when they do.

The same can be said for every item on the action plan – they are likely to lead to Mr A overachieving because the hardest thing to do is to start something. So after we have went over the most recent action plan, we start the process again so that you have a fresh action plan for the following week. The other thing that we can do is discuss new targets and goals. I think everyone will agree that the action plan we outlined for Mr A is more than doable, so if he has other goals that he wants to work towards, he will have the time. Or he could increase the amount of time he spends on his four existing goals and therefore increase his productivity.

So this is what I do as a Life Coach. I do not sit around and tell people what to do or help them manifest things into existence. I help people break their big goals into smaller tasks that they can easily do. Think of Life Coaching as goal management because that is what it is. The thing that most people do not realise is that almost everything is straightforward when you break it down into small steps and are accountable to the small steps instead of the overall goal. You or I could write a book about Keto or any other diet without any expertise if we decided to and as long as the small steps were logical ones, the book would be full of useful information. One of my favourite books is Tim Ferris’ Tribe of Mentors. Tim is an amazing author but on this occasion he did not use any of his writing skills. The book consists of the answers to the same 11 questions that he sent to multiple people. He wanted to create a book full of good advise and broke that down into small steps. The steps could easily have been to think of the questions on week 1 and for the next year to set himself a goal of asking X number of people the questions every week. Again, Tim is an amazing author and I would recommend any of his books but almost everyone has the ability to create their own version of Tribe of Mentors by thinking of their own questions and asking whoever is appropriate. Almost every imaginable version of this book would be useful.

Most goals require no more than patience, logic and accountability to achieve. Take this blog for instance. If the goal of this blog was to be read by 1,000 people – that would be easy to achieve as long as I break it into steps. I could print 1,000 copies and offer them to people. If I wanted to achieve this goal in one month, I need to get 32 people per day to read it. I could get on the London Underground and ask people (who are stuck there) if they wanted to spent less than 10 minutes reading it. I could even incentivise reading it. Like so;

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I might need to ask 100 or 500 people in order to reach the 32, depending on how good the incentive is. There are countless ways that I could achieve the goal of getting this in front of 1,000 people in one month. I could even add a QR code to the bottom to take people to a page to enquire about Life Coaching. The point I am making is not that you should expect to see me on the London Underground, but simply that it is easy to break any goal down to small easy tasks.

If you are reading this and would like to book a free Life Coaching session – click here

I hope that this was helpful in both explaining what I do as a Life Coach and showing that things are not as difficult as they seem. I hope the next time you hear that someone is a Life Coach, you do not think that means that they don't really do anything. Life Coaching, when done properly, is more valuable that most services I can think of. Almost everyone can be more productive, but it will not happen magically.

Thank you for reading. I welcome feedback and further conversation on the topic. You can reach out to me by emailing mraaronbenedict@gmail.com

Aaron

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