/ What people ask me as a coach

How does life coaching differ from consulting? Therapy? Sports coaching? A best friend?

Consulting vs. Coaching. We can consider coaching a form of consulting. Consulting is often more information and expertise based. For example, you might hire a consultant to help your business with a specific problem. Coaches may not have expertise in your field. A coach is a specialist at helping you improve your professional and/or personal life. Unlike many consultants who propose a solution and leave you to implement it, your coach stays with you to help you integrate the changes, new skills, and goals to make sure they really happen. This makes coaching effective.

Therapy vs. Coaching. Coaching is not therapy. Life coaches don't work on past-based issues or traumas. If you start life coaching and have not resolved an issue from the past, then it is likely you need to work with a therapist to resolve the issue. It is very common for unresolved traumas or addictions to stop us from getting what we want in our lives. Life coaches focus on the present and your goals for the future. We help you move forward and set personal and professional goals that will give you the life and career you really want. Most coaching clients are healthy, successful people who might be stuck or want to make a big change in their lives and want the support of a coach to do so.
Close friends vs. Coaching. Typically, friends are not professionals who are able and who have the time or the concentration to guide you through a structured process to achieve the most important aspects of your personal and professional life.

Sports. Life coaching often includes principles from sports coaching, such as being your best, doing more than you think you can, working with a team, going for the goal. However, unlike sports coaching, coaching is not about comparative competition; it is about incremental a better version of yourself according to your own standards and values.

The underlying philosophy of life coaching: If there is a gap between where you are now and where you want to be, then there is room for life coaching. Obviously, it is possible to close this gap on your own. However, coaching benefits are substantial. First, social and financial commitments increase motivation, focus, and seriousness about one's own personal and professional development. Second, a skillful coach provides a honed outside-view and goal-oriented processability and knowledge that leads to high-quality systems, strategies, and actions consistently. As a result, the gap between valuable theory and daily practice will be closed.

What is a useful length for a coaching commitment?

A coach can help you improve your life, but you still need to take responsibility for the changes you want to make. They will not do the work for you. For that reason, some coaches ask for a three, six, or 12-month commitment. Before they invest the time and energy into working with you, they want to know that the coachee is committed to professional and/or personal development.

For example, Max came to me because he was looking for some accountability and support for his work as a freelancer. Since he worked from home most days, he found it hard to get motivated and to remain focused on his work. He wasted time until deadlines were looming. His procrastinating ways caused him stress and a loss of revenue. Since Jim had previously had good working habits, he needed someone to help him establish new routines and to deal with his client issues in a more constructive way. Within two months, we restored his productivity.

On average, most people find coaching more beneficial than they initially expected after a handful of sessions. As a result, many coaches ask for a three to six-month commitment but, usually, let you stop immediately if coaching is not working for you. It is also not uncommon for coachees to decide to conceptualize coaching as a life-long component in their personal development system and prioritize it accordingly.

Can a dependency be created between coach and client?

Ideally not. Anyone who has big goals can benefit from the structure, advice, and support of a coach. As far as creating an emotional or psychological dependency, coaches work only with people who are healthy and successful on their own. It is impossible for a coachee not to improve his way of thinking if he or she is consistently exposed to a skillful coach. Ultimately, the thinking of the coachee will reach a point where it is like that of the coach. At this point, the benefits related to thinking style are not as strong as before, but the previously mentioned benefits of improved commitment, motivation, focus, seriousness, outside-view, and process guidance remain consistent throughout life.

Why would people who are already successful hire a life coach?

People have reached success and managed life in the past without a coach. So, nobody really "needs" a life coach to become successful in personal and professional domains, but many people want one. One reason for the growing demand for coaching is the complexity of modern-day life. Whereas your parents might have been happy to have a job that paid the bills, most people today want a job that is fulfilling and financially rewarding. They want to find work that is in line with their core values and expresses who they are. They want to combine highly meaningful work with highly meaningful relationships with family, friends, and romantic partners.

Shouldn't I be able to reach my goals on my own?

Are "hard work and doing it on your own" the keys to finding professional and personal success and happiness? People believe that hard work means to sacrifice their health, their time to enjoy life, or their relationships to attain what they want. Well, you can have it all, but maybe not at the same minute. Coaching helps you from a long-term perspective to manage your priorities deliberately and situationally. Typically, you will have cut the unessential things and prioritize high-quality strategies and actions to achieve more fulfilling social relationships and professional and personal success. Elite athletes, performers, CEO's, and presidents all have coaches. They know they need a coach or even a team of experts to help them determine the best priorities, strategies, and actions, and to provide them with high-quality support and feedback. Without this, it is hard to achieve elite or world-class levels of excellence. No athlete would consider going to the Olympics without the support of a coach because the extra edge the coach provides makes all the difference.

Why is coaching more effective than unassisted professional and personal development?

First, coaching creates momentum and keeps the momentum and motivation consistently high. Conversely, unassisted development usually has a strong fluctuation in momentum, motivation, and commitment that lead to ineffective building and sustaining peak performance mindsets and habits. Second, the coach will keep you effectively accountable because he has a highly informed and detailed outside-view on your ambitions, values, and goals. As a result, self-deception and self-delusion are also limited. In contrast, unassisted development usually suffers from a lot of derailing and delaying of high-priority actions until a lucky meta-cognition recognizes that our actions are far off from matching with our ambitions, values, and goals. As a result, we might refocus and re-prioritize, but this may also not last for too long. These are the two key benefits, but there are considerably more gained from coaching.

What is the ultimate goal of our actualizing work together?

The ultimate goal of our work together is to close the gap between your current self and your best possible imagined heroic self. Over time, we want you consistently express more of your noblest version. With this goal in mind, we work on the currently most promising growth areas or bottlenecks like stress or productivity.

What coaching-based actualizing activities do you recommend?

Coaching session. The coaching session itself is the most important activity that you want to make a non-negotiable. Similar to meditation, you will find that there is no bad coaching session. Sometimes the sessions you feel least motivated to do, they turn out to be some of the most growthful sessions. If live is exceptionally demanding, then it is okay for a predefined time to not do the coaching actions, coaching report, or other self-actualizing activities. However, coachee found maintaining a minimum baseline of self-actualizing with the coaching sessions during such times extremely valuable. The recommended minimum time is two hours. Coachees often like three hours because that enable to do deep conceptual and practical work in an unhurried manner.

Coaching actions. Coaching sessions can be a mix of conceptual and practical work. To ensure that our work has a real-life impact, we will ask ourselves at the end of every session, “what the actions are to create lasting value from the session?” We will collaboratively define 3-5 actions as responses to the question. The recommended time for coaching actions is one to two hours. If you do one hour, then it might be likely that you will not be able to do all the actions. This might also be the case for two hours depending on the actions. However, do not feel dissatisfied or expect something different because it is normal that we will have some actions left as it is difficult to accurately evaluate the time needed for those actions in advance. Doing at least one hour is often essential to reap the benefits from the session. Moreover, it is another learning opportunity in line with the concept of spaced repetition as you are revisiting the content of the session.

Coaching report. The report has different functions based on the questions we specified. From the coach perspective, it helps to understand the state and development of the different life areas of the coachee. Consequently, sessions can be better tailored to the current needs of the coachee, more connections (= learning) can be made, more reoccurring patterns can be uncovered. From the coachee perspective, the report helps you to feel a sense of progress in your personal and professional life, while also providing clues for further areas of development. It is also recommended to make connections between your life and the last session(s) to fill the models and concepts with personal meaning. As a result, you will create better mental or thinking habits. Keep in mind, these are merely a few of the functions of the coaching report. The recommended time is also one to two hours

How are the coaching sessions structured?

Coaching is a collaborative art form. Consequently, structure plays a similar role as in collaborative arts like a dance. An impactful session benefits from allowing space for reoccurring as well as improvised-novel collaborative moves. We start with a check-in based on the report and questions from the coach related to the report, last session(s) or developments in specific unmentioned areas. We might spend 15 minutes to one hour depending on the opportunities for work. Next, we would explore what’s currently on your mind, which has different purposes like uncovering open loops that might disenable you to fully engage with the session. We will collaboratively identify a high impact coaching topic. Depending on your progress, I might suggest coaching topics, or we have pre-defined topics at some point. Next, we set criteria for the success of the session based on a question like “when would todays coaching session be short-term and long-term impactful concerning topic X?” After this, the structure is relatively open and collaborative. Nevertheless, based on my five years of experience, I have a strong intuition on how to achieve the session goals. Towards the last twenty minutes, we start the conclusion of the session by define coaching actions, from-to or value statements, name the session, and say a few concluding appreciative words.

How does coaching contribute to the ultimate coaching goal?

There are countless ways to describe theories of coaching impact. Here are a few more action-oriented statements on how coaching will help you close the gap between your current self and best possible self.

Cultivating more healthy relationships to yourself, identities, emotions, cognitions, mindsets, or beliefs, behaviours, other humans
Conducting experiments open-mindedly to see the impact of changes
Observing how you interact with yourself and others more honestly and perceptively
Drawing actionable insights from your observations and experiments
Learning and applying models, frameworks, and concepts from sociology, psychology, and communication to your life
Connecting profound ideas to your personal experiences
Discovering what helps you change your behaviour / what does not, what makes you feel well / what does not, or what gives you energy and what drains your energy
Being challenged by a nuanced, compassionate, and experienced coach
Growing your character by integrating opposing qualities like playfulness and ambitiousness or spontaneity and self-constraint and cultivating higher levels of qualities like compassion
Motivating you do continuously and seriously inve

What does the coach need to be highly impactful?

Ideally, the coach has not only good procedural knowledge and intuitions (how to get you from A to B without deep understanding of the topic) but also exceptional qualities in terms of character or cognitive, emotional, or behavioural leadership. The coach needs to have accurate and useful general models of personal and professional development and the ability to tailor the sessions to your situation and psychology. The tailoring ability strongly depends on how much the coachee shares with the coach because it takes information and time to develop an accurate model of the coachee and their specific developmental needs. Highly effective coaches do the same as highly effective doctors. They ask for information to predict what the coachee’s/patient’s underlying needs are (diagnosis) and then they predict and recommend what solution (intervention) that moves them closer to their best-possible version

How much does life coaching cost?

Most life coaches charge rates that are comparable to other (mental) health professionals, such as therapists, doctors, or professional trainers. As a certified coach with five years of experience, relevant university degrees and professional experiences as a change management consultant, I charge £250/h.

Should I do coaching if I feel price sensitive?

Price sensitivity is a relatively tricky issue for mindful high-quality service providers because it can cause substantial emotional and attention overhead. I have a strong preference to avoid working with price-sensitive individuals based on past references. Overall, the collaborative work becomes much less enjoyable and impactful for both sides because it tends to cause an overly evaluative and impatient headspace on the side of the coachee and often in reaction the coach might start to optimize for short-term gratification or spending a disproportionate amount on commentary related to the value of the activities

What would you recommend as a first coaching collaboration experiment?

For the first one or two months, another time-related high-importance consideration is that the coaching-sessions will unfold the most impact if they are done on weekly basis because the frequent, spaced repetitions and explorations of the intellectual and practical landscape are essential to move from merely temporary relief and problem-solving to sustainable change (learning) in terms of cognitions, emotions and behaviors. A safe general recommendation is an intensive learning approach that would be 2 hours of weekly coach-facilitated development and at least 2 hours of self-facilitated development (one hour actions and one hour report) for 8 weeks.

The intensive growth “camp” would amount to 3200€ for two months, which is comparable to a few educational courses or events. Afterwards, we or you can evaluate if and how you want to continue (e.g., bi-monthly or monthly).

When should we start?

If you are reading this document, then we should aim to have our first session within the next two weeks because that ensures that our coaching work receives the high priority and diligence it deserves right from the start. Based on many coaching experiences, it is very beneficial for various psychological reasons to switch quickly to a reoccurring day and time.

What would you recommend as a first coaching collaboration experiment?