The role of a Life Coach has not been around as an official career for too long. This means that some of you may not even know what this is (for a basic rundown of what a coach does for you check this out>>> https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-a-life-coach-4129726 I will explain more in this article).

Many people today are turning to a life coach to help them with areas of their life where they are feeling stuck, or where they are suffering in life. And I am not just talking about everyday people. A coach is not just for the average person (although it is a sure way to move from average to living an extraordinary life).

Even once you are living a life that most would deem extraordinary, working with a life coach is still important. Don’t believe me? You don’t have to. Check out what these powerful people have been using the power of coaching for in their extraordinary lives> ( https://www.elitedaily.com/entertainment/celebrities-life-coach-career/1426180 ).

Many people are also still skeptical of the investment in a life coach. I did use the word investment instead of cost here. There is a BIG reason for this. That reason is that coaching is not a cost, it is an investment. I will explain more further in this article.

Life coaching is also different from therapy. In this article I am not wanting to focus on this topic (I will in the future), but for now, here is a helpful article that outlines the differences. You might find it useful if you are someone working with a counselor or therapist and believing that hiring a coach can’t benefit you. Many of my clients are in counseling in tandem with me as their coach. https://www.betterup.com/blog/life-coaching

So, for those of you who are sitting on the fence about hiring a life coach, or maybe you have decided it is just not for you. I want to share with you 10 very important reasons why hiring a life coach is one of the most valuable actions you can take for your life (that is right… valuable, not expensive.

• A life coach will guide you in removing social programming that is harming your growth.

Many people are unaware of the effects of their social programming. Even those who are aware might not be able to grasp the depth of its effects on their day-to-day behavior and decisions. This leaves many people living a life where they feel like “facts” are what is determining the circumstances of their life, when the truth is that they have power.

Here is an interesting article on how the subconscious mind can latch onto socially programmed limiting beliefs and steer your life without you even knowing it. Definitely something to take the time to read after you finish here! (https://www.forbes.com/sites/womensmedia/2020/08/03/how-your-subconscious-mind-is-running-your-life-and-how-to-fix-it/?sh=29ed91bf6b07 )

A life coach uses powerful, compassionate tools to bring more of this social programming into a conscious objective view for their client. In this way a client has the opportunity to explore with their coach, how this programming is shaping the current life they are living.

Once this is visible to a client (you could be one of them), the door to possibility begins to open. Once a client is able to see how they have been making decisions that are shaping their current reality of life, and circumstances in life, and that these decisions are being made based in beliefs, not facts, then the client becomes empowered to make REAL change.

The problem with trying to do this on your own, is that many people have not been taught the tools, and how to practice them, that allow them to create this space and objective stance in viewing their own beliefs about themselves and life. This means that when left on their own, they will misinterpret the usage of coaching tools. They will also misinterpret the results of using those tools, and further validate beliefs that are holding them back, as facts.

Working with a life coach will keep you on the path of using powerful self-awareness tools in a way that pulls you forward into the life you dream of living. Without this, you may end up in cycles of behavior that you believe you are getting out of, and then maybe create a belief that personal development, or going after your goals for life, is just not possible for you.

I see this happen all of the time with people who do not want to invest in coaching, so they buy a bunch of self-help books, and listen to podcasts, and believe they are just going to make this change on their own. The truth is, you have every power to do this within you, but you have been deeply socially programmed to actually avoid using this power.

On top of the social programming, you also have a brain that has a few tricks up its sleeve. And this brings me to the next reason why you want to invest in coaching.

• A life coach will help you understand, and manage the biology of your brain.

Often times when I begin my work with a client, hear from them all of the ways in which they are broken, or corrupt, or evil, or that something is really wrong with them. I do my job as their life coach and hold space for them to speak their truth about how broken they are.

Then I guide them through powerful questioning to see for themselves that they do not actually want to believe they are broken. They have usually been conditioned to believe that they have to believe there is something wrong with them.

Then I guide them into seeing all of the things they believed were wrong with them, are actually just symptoms of having a healthy, perfectly evolved brain. But they have been letting this brain run their life, much like letting a child run around unsupervised with a chainsaw.

You see, it is my job to show people how their brain wants to operate based on its biology, and history. The brain is a highly evolved organ, that is capable of some really incredible things. But there is a big part of this brain that is running some very outdated “software” (if we compare the brain to a computer).

You see, we are evolving our society, culture, environment, and world around us at faster and faster speeds. But the brain can only evolve biologically at the speed of biological evolution. And this speed is VERY slow. So, the brains that we have, while they are powerful tools, are running on some very old, outdated information, software, and wiring that does not fit in well in a modern context when left to run, unattended.

But this is what is great about working with a life coach. They are not only going to educate you on how your brain is working to convince you of so many things that are actually just outdated wiring and software. And they will not stop there. A life coach is going to show you how YOU get to use that brain as a powerful tool FOR YOU. Where most people (probably you) fall in the category I spoke about just a few paragraphs ago. You are leaving your brain unattended to run around with a chainsaw in your life, and then wondering why everything you want to build in your life keeps ending up cut down (by said chainsaw, that you are unaware of).

Working with a coach is going to bring all of this into your awareness and give you the tools you need to turn that brain into a powerful tool that YOU are consciously, and intentionally in charge of. And this is HUGE.

Look at the results you have in your life now. I know they are not what you want, but they feel very very real for you. And those results were built by a brain, unattended, without your permission. Imagine what you can now build with that brain, once you have the owner’s manual and know how to use its power to build what you ACTUALLY want in this life?

The possibilities become endless! And a life coach is going to guide you into the driver’s seat of your brain. And, even with the outdated wiring in the one part of your brain, they are going to show you how to use the other part (your cerebral cortex) to manage the outdated part of your brain. You will learn to do this with compassion, intention, awareness, authenticity, and empowerment. No more trying to use willpower to resist your own brain’s urges.

A life coach is going to show you the empowered path.

• A coach will provide a powerful safe space for TRUE transformation to occur.

A life coach is trained in holding space. For many of you reading this, you may not understand what this means. Holding space means that a person is present with another person while they have their true emotional experience of life. The person who is present does not judge or try to change the emotional experience. They do not indulge the emotional experience, but they also do not resist it.

When holding space a person allows another person the full opportunity to experience their emotions through the entire emotional wave. This allows space for a person to process the emotion and arrive on the other side where opportunity is present. A life coach is trained in being able to offer this for people.

This is CRUCIAL for personal development. Being able to hold space for emotions, and process them fully through, and then learn from this. This is one of the reasons why so many people suffer in their life. We will discuss that more in a bit. But, for now it is important that you understand why holding space is essential.

We live in a culture/ society that believes in using resistance, shame, guilt, and fear as motivators for change. But, when we use these modalities for change, we end up creating temporary quick fix changes, not the authentic lifelong changes we are actually wanting to make.

This is because when we use resistance, fear, guilt, and shame, we are actually changing by running away from something. And what we are running away from is a misunderstood, false story. When we run away from stories like this, we do not understand them enough to change them, so the story stays true for us, and then continues to go about creating results in our life to reinforce the story, and keep it feeling “true” for us.

But this is not the only issue here. When we run away as our way to change, we do not have a clear destination in mind. We cannot have a clear destination in mind other than the false story that we are running from, but still believe – so we end up right back where we began.

To create real change, we want a clear understanding of these stories in our life that we are being taught to run from in shame, or guilt. And in doing this we see a clear, empowered starting point to put into our “GPS” for our life.

Then we can begin seeing our power in creating a new story of possibility and using that story to create a “destination” that is clear, authentic, and exciting for us. Then we get to use this together to start creating step-by-step, unstoppable action toward this new destination in life.

Working with a coach will provide you with the safe space to explore all of this, without ending up in an all-out sprint to escape guilt, fear, or shame that will come up when you begin to examine the truth of your life. Working with a coach will help you to stay fully present with compassion, curiosity, and openness to explore the full truth safely, and create the start to a powerful journey with a clear beginning, and destination that is in focus for you.

• A life coach will teach you how to give yourself permission to dream.

This one may sound a bit strange. I mean; dreaming just happens for us right?

Initially this is true. But some experience happens along the way. And as adults many of us no longer give ourselves permission to dream, or permission to see our dreams, or permission to validate that we are the person that can make those dreams a reality for ourselves.

Often, when I begin working with a client as their life coach, I find that they do not even realize the exciting vastness of their own dreaming. This is usually due to a programmed story about what is possible, or responsible for them to go after in their life.

Many of these stories come from well-intentioned adults when they were kids (parents, teachers, grandparents, role models, etc…). My clients find themselves in a position where they do not even realize anymore that they have huge goals and dreams for their life, and that they have the power and freedom now as an adult to make the choices that make these dreams and goals a real-life possibility for themselves now.

They are stuck in these stories that they trusted and internalized at such a young age. As their life coach, I take them through some powerful questioning to discover again what THEY WANT TO believe is possible for their life, and why they had believed the story that could not believe these things are possible for them.

In doing this, clients begin to open up curiosity again for themselves. Places in their life where they were seeing walls, suddenly began to look more like closed door, with a handle, and they were holding the key to the lock. Slowly as I coach clients, I watch them begin to open doors that they had locked closed for years or even decades to find hidden treasures waiting for them.

Now, usually they slip into programmed patterns of dismissing the joy they feel at this re-discovery. They slip into rejecting the excitement of them being the person who will make those dreams their reality. They slip into stories again of how they are too broken, or not good enough to dream these things, much less make them their reality.

As a life coach, I hold space for them to have these stories, and then I go on a journey with them to explore the stories, as well as the exciting dream they are wanting to reject. I give them space to work through their internal stories of rejection, fear, shame, and guilt, and guide them back into possibility and excitement on the other side.

Slowly what begins to happen is that they feel safe to dream again. They begin to trust themselves to have dreams without the deep, painful stab of internal rejection, and shaming that they had the habit of using on themselves.

This leads me to one last reason to work with a life coach, that I want to discuss with you today. After you begin to let yourself dream, you may wonder what happens next.

• A coach will get you on the path to authentic, unstoppable, confident, and intentional action.

This is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. Many people who do not work with a life coach, but try to let themselves dream, and set goals, get stuck when it comes to action. And there are many reasons why this happens. A life coach is equipped with handling any of those reasons why.

I want to share one big reason why people get stuck at the action phase. It is one that I deal with in every client of mine. It has to do with belief and confidence.

So many people wait around on taking action. They want to absorb information, and more of it, and more of it. They are waiting to have enough information to feel confident enough to take action. But there are many reasons why this does not work.

One of them is that you will never have enough information to avoid obstacles, or unexpected results. No matter how much information you have, you will always face the possibility of an unexpected result, and falling down when you take that big first step forward.

So many people are waiting around until they feel confident that this will not happen to them before they take action. This creates a cycle of being stuck in “information consumption” state. No action occurs here.

The other reason why this never works, is because confidence does not come before action. Confidence is a product of action. And there is one big reason why.

We are confident in what we believe to be true about life. We DO the things that we believe are true about life. Just look around you. Everything you do is because you believe something to be true about life. This is how beliefs shape our results in life.

But here is the crazy part here. This is not a one-way street. Belief, action, confidence, all work in synergy with one another. They all rely on one another in order for them to function as they are designed.

You need a belief to take action, you need action to build confidence, and you need that action and confidence to program a belief. Without this, all you have is a thought of hope or possibility in the brain. What makes a thought or hope into a belief that produces action from confidence… IS action!

This is where the whole “fake it ‘til you make” it phrase comes from (granted we have been using this with a model of resistance, shame and guilt, which is why it never works for most people). When we have a clear idea of what we WANT to believe about life, that will produce actions that will create the life we want to be living, then the bridge to turn that thought of what we want to believe INTO an actual belief, is ACTION.

Confidence comes after the action when we learn to use tools of compassion, understanding, curiosity, and self-acceptance to pick ourselves back up after falling down. When we use these tools to pick ourselves back up, and see that this was all part of the plan (yes falling down is part of the plan), then we begin to build confidence. The confidence comes from knowing that we will have our own back, and get up and learn from ANY result we get from taking action.

With that action and confidence, working in synergy, something else happens in the background. The thought of hope, or possibility begins to collect evidence. It collects evidence that what was only possibility or hope, might actually be true.

The more times we repeat this process the more evidence we build. And the more evidence we build, the more this thought goes from, “this might actually be true” to, “I think this actually is true” to, “OMG THIS IS ACTUALLY TRUE” to, “How on earth did I ever doubt that this was true!?”.

This is the journey of turning dreams into reality. A life coach is equipped with guiding you through this process, even when you brain kicks and screams, and resists and tries to throw out old stories with the intensity of a nuclear bomb on your emotions. Your brain WILL fight you on changing (for many reasons not discussed here today). A life coach is equipped to recognize those strategies of the brain, hold space for them, then guide you back to awareness, empowerment, authenticity, and UNSTOPPABLE action toward your dreams.

My friends, personal development is a POWERFUL, exciting journey. It is full of so much emotion, so many obstacles, and so many tricks from the brain. Working with a life coach keeps you aware, empowered, intentional, and unstoppable in this journey. And, in the end, what you invest into working with a life coach, returns infinite value to your life. The return on investment when working with a life coach is truly infinitely possible.

I know that many of you like numbers and quantifiable results though. I want to offer you that these actually exist to. On average, my clients that hire me, save around $20,000 per year just in becoming more aware and intentional with where their time and energy (and money go). This is only SOME of what they save PER YEAR, and is a conservative average. I am not even getting into the possibility of their earning potential after working with me as their life coach. The earning potential is infinite.

One of my clients started her own business within 3 months of working together. Another changed jobs to a position he was afraid to believe was possible for him before working with me. Another client of mine is creating a completely new career path for herself with earning potential that is almost limitless after working with me, and discovering that she had everything that she needed to get started on her dream, once she got in the driver’s seat of her brain, and moved old stories out of her way.

The results of investing in coaching, are both quantifiable in terms of time, and money value in life. But, working with a coach also goes so much deeper in the value it provides for you in your life by giving you back the power in your life to create a deeply fulfilling, authentic, and enriching experience with your life. You only get one of them my friends. Working with a coach is your best solution for making sure you REALLY know how to, and ACTUALLY DO enjoy EVERY aspect of your life.

But hey… I am not the only person talking about the benefits of investing in coaching. Check out these articles that outline the benefits of coaching from their perspective (great reads).

https://chopra.com/articles/4-benefits-of-having-a-life-coach#:~:text=A%20life%20coach%20can%20assist,skills%2C%20debt%2C%20and%20spirituality

https://positivepsychology.com/benefits-life-coaching-mentoring/

It is time to RISE & THRIVE my friend!