Life Coaching

Coaching is booming. In 1999, Life Coaching was practically unknown in the UK. Now a Google of ‘UK Life Coach’ throws up thousands of sites. According to the UK’s Association for Coaching an estimated 100,000 people used a Coach last year, not to mention the explosion in organisational coaching activity.

In fact coaching is the fastest growing professional service in the UK after IT. It is not hard to understand why. A career in coaching is one of the most rewarding and fulfilling occupations within the service industry. Coaches act as a catalyst in peoples’ lives, helping them to bring out their best, know where they are going, and how they will get there. What could be more rewarding than that?

Anyone who has experienced being coached will attest to a more positive outlook, heightened self-awareness and a feeling of liberation and exhilaration. Life Coaching is a holistic approach to developing all aspects of a clients’ life and leaves the client feeling motivated and committed to achieving specific and realistic goals.

Life Coaching still has its sceptics; why would anyone pay £300 a month to confide in a complete stranger when they could talk through their issues with a friend or colleague? If you have tried this, you probably know the answer.

Your friends or colleagues tend not to be altogether objective and are often desperate to prescribe the solution and tell you what you should do. How many of them will really listen to you unconditionally with no agenda of their own? In any event it is highly unlikely that they will support you, encourage you, remain non-judgemental and keep everything you say in complete confidence!

So, long live the sceptics because every one of them is a potential client. As for justifying your fees, let's consider some alternatives for making yourself feel better:

• Go on a luxury holiday
• Do some retail therapy
• Have cosmetic surgery
• Leave your job….

The reality is that if you do not address what is really important to you, any euphoria or sense of well being, you experience from the endless list of alternatives, is likely to be both expensive and temporary.

It will always remain difficult to prove the enormous benefits of Coaching in private practice because of the confidential nature of the Coach/Client relationship but there is now overwhelming evidence to support the effectiveness of Coaching in the workplace.

(Coaching at Work Survey 2005, conducted by the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development)