Why use life coaching?
I see life coaching as a way of managing changes in one or more areas of life. These changes can be external - caused by external events or circumstances or they can be internal - changes that we want or decide to make to progress our lives in some way.
The impact of change in one area of our life can cause related but unexpected changes in other areas and this can be difficult to predict or manage.
Because a big change in one area of life (e,g, career) can impact others - family life, relationships, I promote life coaching as the preferred tool because it covers all the important areas.
How I work
Whether you are responding to external change or driving internal change I use life coaching to help balance all the impacts. Using ideas from narrative psychology we create a vision of the different important storylines that we want to manage: e.g. family of origin; work/career; relationships; social/support network; passions.
In parallel we work on eliciting, describing, developing personal values to establish what matters for you. This can be a difficult stage as personal values are not a common or frequent topic for exploration and we often assume that they are obvious and universal without giving them a detailed examination.
In addition we have more than one type of value and the type I am looking for first are the "drivers" - the "doing" values rather than the "being" values. -
(1) Achievement & work values
(2) Life style values
(3) Spiritual or meaning values
I see the other "being" values as more about how we are with others - relationships, social interactions , family and perhaps religious or moral positions.
Sometimes these act as a brake on our "doing" values . When this clash of values occurs then my job is to help you work through it to find the right level of balance between the opposing values or to reframe your values so that they are in harmony.
Once the values are aligned we focus very tightly on the "why?".
By knowing the why we have the motivation and once we have motivation we can move on to the what and the how.
Now we have a fully structured project with the highest chance of success and my role is to keep you on target as you work through your project plan.