Do young professionals need a life coach?
If you’ve ever watched someone lay down in a chair and learn about their past, you might think you know what life coaching is (I certainly did!). But the reality is that life coaches are a lot different than anything you’ve seen on TV. Life coaching is not like therapy, nor do the two share very much in common.
In fact, chances are good that if you think you need a life coach, you probably need a therapist.
Why? Because therapy is a little bit like visiting the doctor for a chronic illness. In both medical and therapy appointments, you see someone, receive information about what you’ve struggled with in the past, and get medication or other tools to cope with what’s hurting you.
Therapy is the right choice for people struggling with severe depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, BPD, or other difficult mental illnesses.
But if therapy is right under those circumstances, when is life coaching right?
Life coaching is right when you want to engage in SELF-IMPROVEMENT.
A life coach doesn’t exist to “fix” what’s broken inside you. Instead, we subscribe to the belief that you’re not broken — much like any other kind of coach, our job is to bring out the absolute best in you, and help you look toward the future.
How can a life coach help you improve?
“A life coach? That’s silly,” you might say. “I don’t need someone to cheer me on while I wash the dishes.” A lot of people think this way. But how would you feel if a sports team, or a company, took the same approach?
Would you believe in a sports team that told its fans it was going to “coach itself” to the national championship? Would you believe in a company that encouraged new employees to “coach themselves” into learning how to do their jobs?
Everyone needs someone to watch their back. Everyone needs someone to encourage them to believe in themselves. And everyone needs someone to help challenge their negative thoughts so that they can rise above those beliefs, re-strategize, and choose new, better beliefs that help them reach their true potential.
- If you’re already sold on the prospect of a life coach, say no more. Here’s where you should go to get matched with the best coaches in the business — people who have been specifically trained to assist you in improving your financial, romantic, personal and professional lives.
What does working with a life coach look like?
A great life coach isn’t like a therapist, where the therapist does the hard work of digging through your past and uncovering challenges. A true coaching experience lets you take the driver’s seat. You’ll be the one in charge of setting your own goals, mastering your own skills and dispensing with your own negative beliefs. Why do we put the onus on you to do all of this, you ask?
Because a true coach knows that people don’t improve when other people do the legwork for them. Life coaches know that the moment they start doing their clients’ work for them, their clients set down the path toward Nowheres-ville. That’s because the moment a client stops working with a coach, nobody will be there to keep encouraging them, and without the tools to provide themselves with self-encouragement, the client will flounder.
We don’t lay out the roadmap for you. Instead, life coaches let you create your own map, and simply circle points of interest along the way. It’s up to you to investigate them.
Does that excite you? If so…
How can I get a life coach?
Singing up with a life coach is the hardest step in actualizing your dreams. Does that sound silly? Well, it’s not. That’s because anyone can agree to the idea of becoming a better version of themselves, but hardly anyone takes the difficult step of investing in themselves.
Think about the hardest choices you’ve ever made in your life. You agonized and deliberated for days, weeks, maybe months. Then, at last, you made a choice, and acted. Choosing to act was SO hard, but ACTING itself was…
…remarkably easy, wasn’t it? You probably breathed a sigh of relief afterward, and wondered why you made things so difficult in your mind.
This is something nobody will tell you about life, but it’s true: what stops us from being our best selves lies in our inability to choose, not in the difficulty of the actions we must perform.
In other words, it’s how we think about our problems that stops us from solving them. Once we know how to think differently, and trust ourselves to follow that new line of thinking, we can reasonably act on anything. Knowing this allows us to do just about anything we set our minds to.
This is the secret that turns regular people into the people we admire. It’s what makes inventors, artists, creatives, financial whizzes, CEOs, young professionals — anyone who’s ever been notable — shine. These people believe in taking opportunities that benefit them.
Do you?
We are a coaching company with expertise in lots of different areas like mental wellness, career, relationships, parenting and a whole lot more. While coaching in The Journal That Talks Back™ can help you to take a deeper look at the above topics, we recognize that there are times when other resources, like therapy and/or counselling, may make more sense. As such, we have begun to develop a Mental Health Directory with well over 800 resources and we are investing time and effort into really growing it. It is also developed in a super user friendly way (we hope) so that it's easier to navigate than say another government website. Click the button below to check out our Mental Health Directory.
