9 Ways Coaching Can Benefit You

Even though coaching is becoming so much more widespread, acknowledged, accepted and used as a way of achieving goals, addressing challenges and developing ourselves personally and professionally, I still notice some people not truly understanding when it can help them. In some of the research I read, one of the reasons people say they would not engage in coaching is because it is not relevant for them at this time in their life.

So, I want to share some ways and times in your life when coaching can benefit you and I am calling them: The 9 C’s of Coaching:

1. Comfort-zone Coaching:

Sometimes in life we find ourselves in the Comfort-zone. Life is sort of ticking along and there’s nothing obviously wrong but we feel somewhat unfulfilled. We may have become complacent, find ourselves in a bit of a rut, feel bored and lacking in energy. This is where coaching can really help us to reconnect with what’s important to us, what makes us happy, what we enjoy and are passionate about. Through coaching we can then be playful and experimental; exploring and evaluating our ideas and options for projects, hobbies or activities that will refresh and reboot our energy and satisfaction with our life.

2. Change Coaching:

Everyone faces some sort of change in their lives, pretty much on a daily basis. Many of these changes we deal with smoothly and naturally. Some changes however create a “blip” for us and we can feel a little unsettled. When this happens, coaching is a great way to have the space to step back and look at the situation more objectively, considering different choices for action so that we manage the change in most effective way.

3. Crisis Coaching:

Some changes aren’t small and we might feel as though we have hit a crisis and feel very challenged in handling a particular situation. When this happens, coaching offers us a safe space to acknowledge our feelings and work with someone in a highly supportive partnership. This safe, supportive partnership allows us to regain our perspective and think beyond the crisis in front of us. It enables us to tap into our own inner strengths, resources and qualities so that we can feel more at choice and can more consciously respond to the situation rather than simply react to it. It’s also important to note that, if we feel really affected and incapacitated by a life crisis, our situation may be better supported through something like counselling or therapy.

4. Coping Coaching:

Once we feel that we can respond to a crisis situation or challenge, we may still need to find ways to cope with the situation in the short or medium term. Here coaching helps us to identify ways to navigate the challenge in the best possible way so that we can either get back on track or embark a new and different path.

5. Courageous Coaching:

Embarking upon a new or different path can sometimes be a challenge in itself, especially when it wasn’t what we expected. In these cases, coaching really helps us to identify our core strengths, values and beliefs; digging deep, tapping into them and leveraging them so that we can consciously carve out the new path and actively take steps to embark upon it.

6. Contentment Coaching:

I sometimes call this “life is good coaching” and it’s when everything seems to be just the way we want it to be – and we want to keep it that way! Coaching offers us the opportunity to be conscious and aware of what it is that makes life good for us so that; rather than leave things to chance, we can proactively design our life to be the way we want it to be. Having this awareness to begin with is also really helpful when life presents a change or a challenge as that way we already have some very clear criteria and parameters to help guide us through that change.

7. Catalytic Coaching:

Life doesn’t just present us with changes, sometimes we present them to life! We may decide that we want to make a change that will be a catalyst for us either personally and/or professionally; something that will set us along a different path in a direction we really want to go. Coaching gives us the opportunity to define and describe the change we want to make; it helps us to connect with why the change is so important for us and to explore and establish methods and actions that will give us the best chance of success.

8. Creative Coaching:

Whilst we all have the capacity to be creative somehow, we don’t always feel that way. We are also creatures of habit, even in our patterns of thinking and some tasks or projects require us to really tap into our creative juices. A core part of coaching is to partner with our clients to explore beyond their current thinking about themselves, their situation, their project and goal. In this way, new thinking can be unlocked. New thinking leads to new actions enabling us to be more creative in how we approach and progress towards our goals.

9. Cosmic Coaching:

Last but not least, Cosmic Coaching is a term I use to describe the work we do when we want to achieve or do something really cosmic! Maybe it’s a “bucket list” project or a dream that we’ve always had for ourselves. Here coaching really helps us to define, shape and deeply connect with our vision and our aspirations for our life. Having said that, I think that all coaching is cosmic!