Life Coaching or Counselling – what to take

Are you looking for help, to overcome any issue or just for development, and this question triggers often on which route to take – a counselling session or Coaching sessions. Well, we’ll see it here and understand Life coaching in more details, which has suddenly become so popular.

Life coaching and mentoring has been the trend of late, while Counselling was in last few decades. While Counselling is a mature field and hence its eligibility and requirement criteria’s are often clear, Life coaching is still an unregulated field. There is almost a flood of people providing Life-coach certification, the courses go for few days offline to as little as only few hours online.

Certifications – Certification programs are a lot at this moment where most of them were developed in last few years only, this is still an unregulated field. Certification is not required. Testing and licensing do not exist.

Knowing this, why do people hire a life coach? Because Education does not always equal wisdom, and experience is proving to be more important specially in areas related to social science.

Life Coaching has actually emerged from the traditional ways. It is a result of decades of research in social psychology, clinical psychology, and professional coaching. The practice primarily has its roots in humanistic and transpersonal psychology (Williams, 2012). Life coaching also draws from humanistic psychology to adopt a foundation of unconditional positive regard in the coaching relationship. Coaches always accept clients as they are, viewing and treating them as inherently worthy and deserving of love (Williams, 2012).

Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It’s helping them to learn rather than teaching them. – Timothy Gallwey

The foundation of a good coaching relationship is trust and authenticity. A life coach is someone to whom you formally turn when seeking guidance or advice regarding challenges, decisions, or questions in your life. It is important to understand in simple words that Life coaching is not therapy or counseling. Life coaching also differs from mentorship and training. While a Therapy or Counselling is about a mental health professional working with a client seeking guidance around mental wellness, in a mentorship training a professional works with a more experienced professional.

A life coach can help a person to identify strengths, develop them, and identify personal and professional goals. Their role is to assist the coachee throughout the change process. Most of the session involves the coach listening, and then asking powerfully focused questions.  Some examples are :

• What are your goals as per priority?
• What has been your roadblocks?
• What is the time frame within which the required change is needed?
• What did you learn from the experience?

Hope this small update was useful, please share you view on what type of content would you like to see, what would be more helpful and I will try.

We would be happy to answer any question or help further. You can reach at – info@shikti.com or drsantkj@gmail.com or through Online form., you can also reach directly via – (91) 8050720280.

Thank you for your time, Stay Blessed. – Dr Sant (Master Life Coach, NLP Master Practitioner, Msc-Psychology, MBA)