5 Benefits of Hiring a Life Coach

What are the benefits of a life coach? This question is a reasonable one. The simple answer is to help you make changes in your life, significant changes, and life-changing changes! Doing that type of work on your own can be difficult, and often people give up before they reach the results they want. When this happens, the person can feel like they failed and begin to beat themselves up for not being good enough to reach their goal. They don't realize that making those significant changes is hard to do independently.

When someone comes to me to talk about hiring me as a coach, I ask, "are you ready to do the work?" You will be working to make these changes happen. A coach can't wave a magic wand; you have to do the work. It's not back-breaking work, but it can be uncomfortable at times, change always is. If you are committed to making the vision you have a reality, read on, and let me tell you about my top 5 reasons to hire a life coach.

Hire a Life Coach to Fast-Tracked Results

After determining if the person is ready to work and is committed to change, I ask them if they like to see progress happen quickly, or do you like slogging away at something for months or even years before seeing the result?

I inevitably get the response, "Yeah, I like fast results." Quick results are reason number 1 to hire a life coach. When you work with a coach, they can help you clear away the debris and get to the meat of the issue. This clarity allows you to make a plan and quickly work on executing it.

A coach knows the questions to ask to help you see things from a different perspective. They will also call bullsh*t when you are slinging excuses all over the place. When you are working on making changes on your own, it is very common to talk yourself out of what you are doing when you start to get outside your comfort zone (more on that later). By calling bullsh*t, the coach can help you see the things you might be avoiding or how you might be trying unconsciously to protect yourself. This honesty allows you to work through the tough stuff a lot faster.

A Benefits of Hiring a Life Coach is Being Held Accountable

When you have gotten clarity, made a plan, and have someone calling bullsh*t when you need to hear it, you are off to an excellent start to making fast progress, and it leads us to the following reason to hire a life coach, which is that they will hold you accountable.

A good life coach will help you set actionable goals then they will guide you to meeting those goals in a timely fashion. It is a human response to set a goal and then waffle on completing it; I'll do it later, or I'd prefer to do this right now, I'll do that next week.

When we have someone to whom we are accountable, we tend to be more motivated to complete what we have planned. This accountability is an excellent reason to hire a coach. You could have a friend be the person you report your progress to, but friends are good at cutting us slack, and that is not what you need when you are working on making changes.

Moving Outside of Your Comfort Zone

"My life is perfect. Now I'm going to change everything," said no one ever! Change is uncomfortable and scary. You are an intelligent person, and you know when you need to make changes. Things aren't working, and your life isn't the way you would like it to be, or there may be one part of your life that you know needs to change. Moving outside of your comfort zone can be less scary when you have a coach walking with you. They will help you manage the anxiety and keep you going during those dark moments when you want to give up.

Life is all about personal growth and becoming the best version of who we were meant to be. We make a change, feel uncomfortable for a while, get used to it, and then it becomes part of our comfort zone, rinse and repeat. Personal growth is a process. When we get comfortable, it's not uncommon to get an itch to make some changes. Getting a life coach to help you decide what to change and then lead you through the change process is key to your success.

Changing Your Mindset

Are you finding that your thinking tends to be negative, judgmental, or tinged with a sense of hopelessness? Do you tend to see the worst in things? If so, you have what is called a negative mindset. Since the beginning of time, seeing the negative has managed to keep the human race safe.

Imagine if Urgh, the Neanderthal, had always been looking for the positive; he would have missed seeing that tiger looking for lunch. The human race wouldn't have lasted long. Our natural tendency to be negative hasn't evolved as fast as the world we live in. There are no longer tigers lurking behind every tree, waiting to eat us, meaning we are free to look for the good in all we do.

Working with a life coach will help you change your natural negativity set point. Some people are naturally more positive, and some are more negative, but you can increase your positivity no matter where you fall on the negative/positive spectrum. A coach can help you determine what steps you need to take and support you in getting to where you want to be.

Seeing What You Can't See

The fifth reason I have for people hiring a life coach is that they can help you see things you don't see on your own. Previously, I mentioned that a life coach could help you gain clarity. A coach can also help you clarify things you have become blind to. We all have something in our lives that we have become so accustomed to that we don't see it anymore, be it the spackled hole in the hallway that you have never painted over or how you always put yourself down when someone compliments you.

Working with a life coach won't get you to start seeing that spackle spot that needs painting, but it will help shine a light on the things you do so you can see where you need to make positive changes. You can't change something that you don't see; therefore, having a coach is vital to making positive change that lasts.

You can't change things that you don't see as problems. Let me give you an example; maybe you know that you are having a hard time making friends and getting along with your colleagues. You want to work at changing this. Your coach notices that you will talk over people and not listen to what they say when people talk to you. She brings this to your attention, and you have a conversation about how this gives the impression that you don't care what the person has to say and that what you have to say is more important.

Once you become aware of your behavior, you can make necessary changes. You start practicing listening deeply to what people are saying and then giving yourself a chance to answer authentically to what was said to you. After making these changes, you notice a positive difference in how people respond to you.

Wrapping it all up

Now that you know the benefits of hiring a life coach and how it can be vital to helping you to make lasting life changes, you need to ask yourself, am I ready to commit to doing the work? If you aren't in a place where you are ready, you could waste time and money and potentially get discouraged and frustrated; that's not helpful.

It's better to admit you are not in a place to do the work than to push on through and attempt to do it anyway. There are times when it is not ideal for making big changes in our lives. Suppose you have recently gone through a significant life-changing event such as a death, divorce, separation, the birth of a child, or the diagnosis of a major illness. Process the event, come to terms with the loss or life change, potentially enlist the help of a licensed mental health practitioner to help you with the process.

Going through the process of dealing with the changes in your life will likely help you come to a place where you become clear on the changes you want to make. Those big shake-ups in our lives are lessons that we need to learn to help us make the changes we need to make.

It doesn't always take your life falling apart to warrant making changes. If you feel that some part of your life isn't going as you want it to, then look into getting a coach to support you in making changes. It will help you reach your goals quicker, with support and clarity that you wouldn't have doing it yourself.

As Heraclitus said, "there is nothing permanent except change." So make some changes today, call a coach and get working on the life of your dreams.

In Gratitude,

Karen