Life coaching combines the power of accountability, encouragement and planning to keep you motivated. If you slide back into old habits, the coach reminds you how to try again. Your focus will stay on action instead of excuses.

The accountability comes with encouragement. You won’t be updating your life alone. You’ll have a coach to help you strive for positive change.

Clear actions are defined during your coaching sessions so you’ll know what to do. Your motivation is constantly strengthened as you follow your life coaching plan. Every step you take toward your goals adds to your motivation.

When considering a particular area of life, be it career, family, relationships, health, and so on, individuals fall into one of five camps:

1. I don’t know what I want;
2. I know what I want, but don’t know how to get it;
3. I know what I want and how to get it, but something keeps holding me back;
4. I know what I want, how to get it and I’m motivated and on track; and
5. I know what I want and I’ve already got it!

The life coaching process is most relevant and beneficial for those people falling into the first three camps above. A fundamental principle behind coaching is that each person knows best what they want. Friends, regardless of how well they may know you or whether they have your best interests at heart, still see your life from their perspective. Parents, mentors, counsellors and the like bring to the table their experiences and advise you on what you should do based on that. However, what may be relevant and important to them, may not always be equally so for you.

Call it gut-feel, intuition, or a hunch you generally do know what you want or don’t want at some level. It may not be at a conscious level, or worse yet it may be well hidden but at your very core you do know. An effective life coach is one who is able to help you access your own inner knowledge. In doing so, you establish what you really want in a particular scenario. The coaching techniques employed to do this vary from person to person and range from asking powerful open-ended questions and creative visualisation to considering the same subject from a variety of different perspectives.

You’ll learn how to let go of old baggage that will never make you happy. Coaching switches your focus to the future so the love of a soul mate can enrich your life.

Relationships have their emotional ups and downs. With relationship coaching you’ll learn how to stay mindful of your feelings. When you stay in touch with how you feel, you’ll be able to make deeper connections with your partner.

Coaching helps you become the best person you can be. After you learn how to love and appreciate yourself, you’ll bring this warmth to other people. This naturally makes you more attractive. And it will lessen the chance of misunderstandings and friction.

Coaching helps you find and keep true love

Relationship coaching gives you a chance to explore your feelings. You’ll get to find out what you really want for yourself. This knowledge will stop you from projecting your needs on others. Instead you’ll find a partner that is a perfect fit for your needs.

A crucial part of the coaching process is to improve your communication. Your partner wants to know how you feel. With coaching support you’ll learn to express yourself better.

Relationship coaching stops you from:

• Bottling up your feelings
• Arguing and blaming
• Fearing commitment

Communication is a two-way street. As well as learning how to express yourself, you’ll learn to listen. Relationship coaching teaches you to imagine your partner’s perspective too. This will make you more attentive. And when you’re tuned into your partner, you’ll become more compassionate and caring.

The relationship skills you develop through coaching will help you value love. You won’t take it for granted or think you’ll never find it. Instead you’ll see it as a positive goal that benefits you and adds beauty to someone else’s life too.

I confess I have done this one more than one occasion. It’s almost an instinct to yell at your child to get their attention.

I know I am about ready to scream when my shoulders tense, my jaw clenches, and my breathing starts to move at a rapid pace.

I have found that if I pause for a moment and take a few breaths I will handle the situation in a more positive manner. I call this the Peaceful Parent Pause.

When a situation arrives that has you upset follow these steps.

1. Stop (pause).
2. Breathe.
3. Reflect on the situation.
4. React with positive intent or walk away.

Remember we are constantly teaching our children. One way that they learn is from observing us as parents. If we choose to react in a calm route, they will choose to react in a positive manner when they are in situations in their social context.

Good Luck with your next chance to practice the Peaceful Parent Pause.

Coaching is the process of designing solutions and new strategies going forward. This is a very liberating path. And every new success will increase your confidence. You’ll discover how much you can do. And the coach will be there to applaud your efforts.

It’s harder to slip back into old habits when you have coaching support. The coach helps you deal with any setbacks and gets you to keep trying.

Confidence coaching can quickly reverse your self defeating attitude. And as your confidence grows, you’ll like yourself more than ever before.

During the coaching process you’ll envision your success more clearly. The coach will ask you questions that help you discover your true desires. From this knowledge, you’ll create crystal clear goals. Drawn forward by your own desire, your motivation will rise. And your goals will become reality.

Coaching helps you overcome common motivation killers like:

• Overcome negative beliefs about yourself
• Procrastination
• Unclear or shifting goals
• Lack of encouragement

How does coaching help you with your motivation?

During motivational coaching you and the coach create a space where your ideas take center stage. Coaching is meant to help you refine your ideas so you can set realistic goals and go forward.

With motivational coaching you’ll learn to adopt positive thinking. Fear of failing will be replaced by enthusiasm for action. Setbacks will become learning opportunities and not reasons to quit. One of the most powerful parts of coaching is the support and encouragement it offers you.

You’ll discover that it’s good for you to develop yourself and pursue your goals. You don’t have to always set aside your dreams. Coaching empowers you to believe in yourself. This is the foundation of success.

All coaches have a series of tools at their disposal to help them do this, over the next few articles I’m going to be sharing some of these for you to use.

We all have secret worries and fears that we don’t want to share with our social circle but when you’re worried that your aspirations or goals will be judged by your closest friends you can start to hold yourself back. You might find yourself blocking your own goals. If you’ve started assuming that what you want simply isn’t possible, that you don’t deserve to go for it or that you should put others’ needs and desires before your own, then you’re probably not getting the most out of your life. Putting our needs behind those of others is something we do in all aspects of our lives. From work, to our families, to sex – we can get caught up in trying to please other people and ignore our own needs.

One way I ask clients to think bigger about what they want is through future-self exercises, these are exercises that encourage you to think as if you had already achieved what it is you’re working towards. This isn’t about being your ‘best’ or ‘perfect’ future self, God knows there is already so much pressure to be this. This is about giving yourself time to explore what’s possible and being really honest about what you want.

Here’s one exercise that I ask clients to do early on in coaching, it’s an effective way to clearly show what you need to do to achieve your goals.

Write a letter and imagine where you want to be a year today. Imagine what your life looks like, what you’ve achieved and what you’ve had to do to get there. Then write a letter from your future self to your present self.

You want this letter to resonate so here are three steps to getting it right:

1. Write down your goals and what your life looks like when you’re not tolerating it and you are completely happy and you’ve achieved everything you want to. You can be as creative as you like, you’re the only person who will read this so don’t hesitate to put in everything you want.
2. When writing the letter take yourself out of your day to day environment and go somewhere that allows you to dream big. Go somewhere you find inspiring and beautiful to write the letter, take your time and write without editing or censoring. Don’t cross things out or start again, this isn’t about a writing competition, nobody is grading you on your grammar or the realism of your work.
3. Don’t judge what you have written as good or bad, possible or impossible. It’s just what’s here right now. Holding back this judgement opens to the door to being honest with yourself about what really makes you happy, and what you really have to do to achieve it. When you read the letter back to yourself, we want for you to feel inspired and energized by what you have written – this doesn’t want to feel like pressure, more like hope.
4. Now you’ve completed the letter, there are a few things you can do to bring it alive. Keep it where you can see it regularly, and re-read it from time to time to remind yourself of your goals. You can break it down, maybe try splitting the year into quarters with goals for each month. Something I like to do is to share my letter with someone I trust – a coach or a close ally who will champion me and hold me accountable. And there’s a great website called futureme.org – if you post your letter on there, you will get it sent back to your inbox in one year from the date you posted.

Good luck and enjoy!

Successful individuals, like successful businesses, tend to have a clear idea of what they want to achieve. This definition of success, be it anything from being radically innovative to having a position of significant responsibility, is unlikely to be achieved without a practical strategy.

Regardless of whether you work for somebody or are self-employed, below are some coaching questions that will support you in determining a practical way forward:

1. Imagine a time in the future when you are already successful. What do you notice about your work environment at that time?
2. What do you notice about the people, and the kind of work you’re doing at that time?
3. What key skills or talents of yours did you use to achieve that success?
4. How did you leverage your network in order to become so effective?
5. What skills did you need to develop along the way, and how did you master them?
6. Most career paths are fraught with obstacles and set-backs. What resources did you use to help you deal with these in a constructive way?
7. What do you notice about your work ethic that allowed you to become successful in your chosen area?
8. Having achieved your success, what values would you say your work colleagues most appreciate about you?
9. What steps did you take to open doors and create opportunities when you were starting off?