10 Reasons to Work With a Life Coach
I am a true believer that, no matter where you are in your life’s journey, a life coach can be a great support. If you are just starting to ask what your life purpose is, or if you are a strategic planning pro, having a skilled coach by your side can make all the difference.
Life coaching is a partnership with a professional space holder and accountability partner. As a self-care coach, I ask my clients powerful questions to unlock the hidden answers lying buried in their intuition. Session topics range from creating structure for creative entrepreneurs, to self-care for busy moms, to removing barriers for cultivating a sustainable meditation practice.
Receiving life coaching is such a profound experience! How often do you get a full hour to talk about your deepest vulnerabilities, desires, and inner dialogue with someone who has their complete attention on you? Who else can you go to knowing that they will offer space holding and guiding questions, rather than attempting to fix you?
No matter where you happen to be on your self-care journey, here are my 10 reasons why you should hire a life coach:
1. Everybody needs a good listen.
Do you ever try to vent to a friend, only to have them respond with a, “I know! The same thing happened to me…” or a, “You know what you should do…” Friends are people too, God love them, and sometimes they just don’t know how to hold space.
To hold space for someone means to become a container for them to pour their thoughts, ideas, and experiences into. We can’t hold space unless we ourselves have the space to hold. Spaciousness can be cultivated through meditation practice, self-care and training your awareness. Often times, our friends and loved ones simply don’t have the space to give us that we need in order to process.
Processing your experiences out loud with a trained active listener (i.e. life coach) is an extremely powerful experience. A life coach is there to guide your journey with deep questioning and space holding. Together, you identify your goals for the session and then make sure they get accomplished.
You will walk away from a session with a life coach feeling heard, seen, and deeply understood. Because you are! They have taken the time to listen intently and let you know that you are the expert in your own life, and your intuition is the wisdom guiding you forward.
2. You have big goals & dreams.
Is there something in life you want to accomplish, but don’t know where to start? Or maybe you’ve already taken a few steps and feel like you’re stumbling around in the dark? A life coach can be an effective accountability partner to shine the light on your path.
We all need 3 things to accomplish our goals in life – accountability, structure, and space. Accountability is necessary to make sure we don’t fall behind or let our inner critics get the best of us. We need structure to organize our strategy and keep on top of our common procrastination pitfalls. And space (there’s that word again) to process and share our learning along the way.
3. You’re secretly craving structure.
Whether you’re plotting for a huge bucket list-sized goal, or you’ve been wondering lately where your time is going, chances are you need some structure in your life. Structure doesn’t have to be rigid – structure, when balanced with lots of grace, can actually create more freedom in your life!
Think about it – if you had a plan in place for how you spend your time, you could spend less time worrying and procrastinating against getting started. Structure can mean a schedule, template, or outline for your day, week or year. Whatever your time frame, a life coach can help you create a plan for what you need to get done and when.
4. You could benefit from accountability.
Accountability partners help us remember our deepest intentions. When your intention is to wake up and go for a run every morning at 6am, a life coach can help make sure you follow through in a gentle, loving way. I often find with clients that just telling me their plan of action is enough to make sure they follow through. And I’m there in case they don’t, so we can identify what went wrong and adjust the plan accordingly!
5. You want to get to know yourself better.
“If we were not so single minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves.”
It seems like everyone on your insta feed lately is doing deep soul work. There is a cosmic shift going on, and a lot of people are waking up to their spiritual side. Whether you never dipped a toe in your own spiritual waters, or you just want to further evolve into a more purposeful and intentional person, life coaching can help.
Through intention-setting, powerful questioning, and exploring who you need to become in order to meet your goals, the life coaching relationship is designed to foster deeper self-learning. It’s only through learning what makes you you, and what your deepest desires are, that you can discover life’s potential.
6. You are aching for self-care, self-love, & self-compassion.
Maybe your inner dialogue is mostly negative, critical, and even hateful towards yourself (whether you’re conscious of it or not). Deep down, there is a sense that you could be treating yourself better. You could prioritize rest, nourishment and fulfillment over work or productivity.
You’ve seen #selfcare posts on instagram, but you’ve always equated it with mani-pedis or expensive shopping sprees. You’re yearning for something deeper, something you’ve only felt after a really good candlelit restorative yoga session or talking to a friend who really knows how to hold space.
Self-care is the maintenance of self-love. It’s where the rubber meets the road on our journey toward loving ourselves. Self-love requires unlearning that our worth comes from how much we can produce, and instead choosing to believe we are worthy of love intrinsically. If compassion is where our loving kindness meets suffering in the world, self-compassion is the salve for a hurting heart. Sometimes simply placing your hand on your heart and whispering to yourself, “I’m sorry you’re having a hard time right now,” is more than enough to mend our suffering. There is something deeply profound about practicing self-care, self-love and self-compassion – they are life changing!
My particular brand of life coaching is called self-care coaching. I help my clients learn what self-care, self-love and self-compassion look like in their lives, and how they can foster and nourish their relationship to Self. I believe changing the world begins with our relationship to Self – without it, how can we cultivate genuine compassion for others?
7. You want to learn more about & cultivate mindfulness.
Oh, mindfulness. A word often misused, misunderstood, and the subject of much discussion. Depok Chopra says he dislikes the word, as it sounds like your mind is supposed to be full, which is quite the opposite of the point. I like to distill mindfulness down to letting the activity you’re focused on – and only that activity – be the thing that fills your mind. Meaning, if you’re sitting, sit. If you’re walking, walk. If you’re performing rocket surgery, perform rocket surgery.
Mindfulness practice, or the training of our awareness, can help us cease so many forms of suffering. Although our minds have evolved to process and hold many thought threads at once, our being truly craves presence and simplicity. There’s something very grounding and reassuring about simply sitting on the earth, watching the leaves of a tree blow in the wind.
The truth is, it’s really that simple to meditate. Just sit and remind yourself that right now, you’re going to simply be. Each time thoughts arise, recognize them and then guide your awareness back to the present moment, the experience of sitting. It may be simple, but it’s hardly easy – especially in the beginning! A self-care coach can support you on your journey, provide resources, and guide your deep learning around what arises during your meditation practice.
If you sign up for my 1-on-1 self-care coaching program, Become Your Own Soul Mate, you’ll receive custom guided meditations that I’ll record with you in mind, calling you by name and tailoring the prompts to your unique journey. Apply now!
8. You want to create a self-care routine.
Self-care, this loving maintenance of ourselves, can look like many different things to different people. Maybe it’s a cup of soothing tea after a difficult day with your boss. Or perhaps it’s planning a pilgrimage to your ancestral homelands to do some deep DNA-level healing! Or it could be anywhere in between. Through self-care coaching, we journey together to find out what nourishing activities you can experiment with to develop a unique self-care plan that fits your life!
Some people like to know that every day they’re going to do an hour of yoga, 15 minutes of meditation, and write in their gratitude journal before they go to bed. Other people (myself included!) need more variety, and crave a diverse range of nurturing self-care experiences that heal different aspects of their being at different times. After all, we are cyclical beings and part of our process is to understand how our energy shifts through the different seasons of life. Whether it’s a restorative yoga class after a difficult week, or a solo dance party first thing when you wake up, self-care coaching can help you find the right self-care practices for you. Let a coach support your understanding of your self-care needs through these stages, so you can track and adjust your plan to make the next cycle filled with even more care and healing!
9. You want to grow in your time & energy management skills.
Have you ever crawled into bed at night and wondered, “Where did my day go?” How about, “Where did my energy go?” While we all get the same amount of time in the day, our energy is expandable and collapsible. Our industrial revolution-era minds and society can often make us feel as though our worth is tied up in how much we can output. But the truth is, every one has a different rhythm and energy, and chances are it will change over time.
Nevertheless, if we have goals that are in alignment with our purpose, we need to harness our energy force to work through our strategies and make things happen. A life coach can help you track and analyze where your time and energy are going each day, and how to cultivate boundaries to save your energy and time for the things that matter most to you. Managing your time and energy is a skill that can be nurtured with the help of a life coach.
10. You lack direction & want to discover your life’s purpose.
Or maybe you haven’t yet uncovered which goals are in alignment for you on your path. Your life’s purpose is the intersection of your greatest passions and the world’s needs. True fulfillment comes from helping others in the way that lights you up the most, and then pursuing the skills and experience needed to make it happen.
That might seem like a tall order, but you don’t have to go it alone. A life coach can be there to support and guide your journey, and hold you accountable to whatever goals you set out to achieve. Perhaps you’ve felt isolated and bad for not knowing your purpose yet, when it seems like everyone around you is chasing their dreams. Through powerful questioning and deep space holding, coaching can help you unlock your purpose and find meaningful fulfillment.
And now I’d love to hear from you, Dear Ones! Have you ever hired a life coach? Or have you considered it? What’s holding you back? Tell me in the comments below!
Take gentle self-care,
