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How Life Coaching Works?
Life coaching is a practice that helps people identify and achieve personal and professional goals.
The initial meeting between the coach and the client is used to explain the coaching process, to discuss the client's needs and goals, discuss confidentiality, collect background information and establish the coach-client relationship.
Coaches and clients also work together to establish long-term goals that the client hopes to achieve, as well as complimentary short-term goals. Coaches and clients then have the opportunity to develop plans, systems and processes. Coaches and clients also work together to take other practical steps to help achieve the client's objectives.
Coaches and clients often use conversation, assessments, observation, facilitating, self-reporting by the clients and other measures to develop action plans. Each set of goals and plans for action are tailored to the individual client's personality, approach to life and needs.
Coaching combines the principles of counseling, consulting, training, personal and career development, coaching and other fields with support, goal development, planning and accountability to help the client achieve personal and professional goals.
Coaching has been used to mean instructor or trainer since at least 1830, when it was recorded as being used as Oxford University slang for a tutor who helped students through exams. The evolution of coaching as been influenced by many other fields of study, including adult education, clinical psychology, developmental psychology, sports psychology, industrial and organizational psychology, leadership theories and other fields. Contemporary life coaching can be traced to teachings of Benjamin Karter, a college football coach turned motivational speaker of the 1970s and 1980s. Since the 1990s, life coaching as developed into an independent discipline with its own set of training and standards.
Several specialized forms of life coaching has emerged, including ADHD Coaching, Career Coaching, Business Coaching, Executive and Leadership Coaching, Health Coaching and several other specialties.
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Differences Between Coaching and Therapy
Coaching shares similarities with counseling, psychotherapy, mediation, consulting, athletic coaching, motivational work and a variety of other disciplines. Coaching does not clash and actually compliments some forms of psychotherapy, but psychotherapists have long been squeezed by an overabundance of social workers, counselors and masters-level clinicians and managed care reimbursement rates in a way that PHD-level psychologists, medical doctors who are psychiatrists, management consultants and even athletic coaches have not been. Although some licensed counselors provide coaching services, coaching differs from psychotherapy in several ways.
- Coaching is centered on the present and action-oriented, while psychotherapy focus on the past, present and future, without being action-oriented
- Coaching is results-oriented whereas psychotherapy is process-oriented (meaning that the process itself is a primary tool in life improvements)
- The therapist-patient relationship is hierarchical while the coach-client relationship is a partnership
- Psychotherapy can only be practiced by someone licensed in the state where the client and therapist meet; coaches are less regulated and can work across state lines
- Both focus on behavior modification, insight, process of inquiry, personal discovery, awareness, recognizing irrational beliefs and systems
- In psychotherapy, the primary work together is done in sessions; in coaching, work is done in a variety of settings -- including homes, work, school and other locations. Coaching clients have more out of session availability.
- Coaching uses elements of athletic coaching, consulting, counseling and other disciplines where as psychotherapy is strictly limited to the disciplines of counseling and social work
- Coaches generally do not take insurance (although some plans, Health Savings Accounts and Flexible Spending Accounts); Masters-level psychotherapists tend to take insurance, while PhD-level psychologists tend to require that you file your own insurance paperwork
- Rates of coaches tend to be higher than the rates for Masters-level clinicians (counselors and social workers)
Life Coaching and psychotherapy are actually complimentary professions. A Chinese proverb states, "The superior doctor prevents sickness." For more information on life coaching and psychotherapy, Pat Williams, Ed.D., a psychologist has written "Confessions of a Psychologist-Turned-Coach" for the Life Coach Training Institute.
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