What is Coaching?

When someone says that they are a coach, often we think about sports, mentorship, or getting physically trained into better shape.

We usually don’t jump first to the thought of a life coach, and yet, this may be one of the most crucial coaches to have.  We often seek out coaches to get better at something we want to excel at; be it soccer, learning public speaking, yoga, cooking- you name it! As time goes on, our muscles become more tone, newly learned skills become more familiar to us, and we gain confidence in an area that prior to coaching, we knew very little about.  Of all the different experiences we have to explore, LIVING our lives to the fullest is the area I find most crucial in exploring, and often times the most over-looked!  Life coaching is building the muscles, skills, and confidence internally to move us in the direction of the lives we truly want…and to start moving in that direction, we need to figure out the technique and method that best works for you.

So here is my take on life coaching.

We all have a life to live. We all have beliefs that we’ve developed along the way. These beliefs fuel the thoughts that we have each and every day in how we interact with ourselves, and the world around us.  Some of these beliefs are incredible, and help us to achieve amazing things. Others, however, block us from progressing in ways that we want to. Beliefs around money, relationships, career, ourselves….these all affect how we live our lives, and sometimes we can get stuck without even realizing it.  For the longest time, many of us have been stuck with the idea that this is just who I am and just the way my lot in life is… Now, this is no longer the case.

This is where coaching comes in.

The magical thing about beliefs is that we all hold them differently and they can change! The first step is the awareness that a belief you hold might be limiting you from getting something you want- and coaching is the key to start untangling the thoughts that lead back to the beliefs that were generated so long ago (that continue to drive your life, by the way!)

Coaching focuses on finding solutions to move you forward in life rather than rehashing the problem over and over again, essentially keeping you locked in a mental standstill.  There are some areas of life where you may be stuck, and rather than sinking our feet even deeper into the mud, let’s take a look together at what kind of mud you are standing in.  That way, we can begin taking the steps to start moving out of it, through it, above it….until we are no longer IN it. Any approach to start wiggling those toes out of such a firm grip is a tool worth trying.

What is NLP?

NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which is a long way of basically saying “how our conscious and sub-conscious mind relate and choose to work with or against each other”.

We have (and create) thoughts. All the time. All day, everyday.  Often times, they run like a constant movie in our heads, creating stories, ideas, dramas, conflicts- and sometimes in ways that really don’t help us in getting unstuck.  So with these thoughts going on autopilot, we don’t often consider HOW we have gotten these thoughts in the first place! NLP takes the back door to the inner workings of your mind and looks at how these thoughts originated.  Thoughts are the pathways to beliefs we hold to be true. NLP gives you the tools to change limiting beliefs and create new pathways to thoughts that are far more empowering than the ones you may been holding onto for so long.

Think about it this way, it’s kind of like the classic fairytale of Hansel & Gretel. Hansel throws breadcrumbs on the pathway in the forest as a way to lead him and his sister back home to safety.  However, hungry birds eat up some of the crumbs, and the children end up going even deeper into the woods to a gingerbread house with a witch that is up to no good. Relating back to NLP, the breadcrumbs are our thoughts; some are still visible on the pathway and others have “disappeared” with time (but believe me, they are still there!). The gingerbread house hidden deep in the woods is our deep-seated limiting beliefs, candy-coated and sweet on the outside, making us THINK it’s a good thing to have, but ends up FEELING quite the opposite.  The pathway in the woods is the journey we take in coaching sessions together to retrieve the lost breadcrumbs to find the gingerbread house of limiting beliefs…so that we create a new pathway that leads to a much better outcome.