What is Life Coaching

What is Life Coaching?

Life coaching is a process that helps individuals move from their current situation to where they want to be. It focuses on setting and achieving goals in areas such as business, health, career, relationships, and work-life balance.

After 47 years as a successful psychotherapist, a professional change maker, and having worked with more than 5,000 clients, I have incorporated the principles and definition of life coaching within the boundaries and scope of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy cannot avoid this modality, especially when working with cognitive, behavioral modalities, such as neuro-linguistic programming, tapping, mindfulness-based practice, journaling, meditation, relaxation response, and more that:

• Identify specific problems or issues in your daily life that interfere with the quality of your life
• Help you become aware of unproductive thought patterns and how they can negatively impact your life and cause destructive outcomes and behaviors
• Identify negative thinking and reframe it in a way that changes how you feel, which will produce a positive outcome goal.
• Learn new behaviors and how to put them into practice.

Tony Robbins exemplifies the meaning, process, and outcomes of life coaching as do many videos, podcasts, books, movies, and educational television programs. Although not reaching a personal level to everyone, it represents the collective issues that are universal to all human beings. According to his website, he does not have formal training in psychology or any other mental health field.

Life coaching does not and should not be a replacement for therapy, even though there is some overlap when the coach has been a lifelong therapist. It’s impossible to separate the therapist from the life coach and the therapeutic values and principles that therapy offers. To say that there is no crossover would not be true.  However, therapeutic modalities such as EDMR, Inner Child Work, and psychoanalytic theory are not and should not be consistent with coaching.  A Life Coach is not qualified to use any abreactive work that breaks through defenses and releases a previously repressed emotion, achieved through reliving the experience that caused it. That belongs to psychotherapy, not life coaching.

Although coaching primarily works with the neo-cortex of the brain, the part where our thoughts reside, it will also leak into the limbic system, the seat of emotions, as insight is achieved.

Another distinction is that the process of therapy is often a longer investment of time and money.  This is not the case with life coaching unless the coach creates a dependency with the client.  Although not unlike therapy, it includes many of the responsibilities and accountabilities of the client. It assists clients in understanding the choices available rather than working through unresolved childhood wounds and conflicts as they would in a therapeutic process. It does not require the standard weekly or bi-weekly sessions that are expected in therapy.  Currently, life coaching is not covered by insurance, as in psychotherapy with a licensed professional.

If you are interested in my services in Life Coaching, email, text, or call me: joanechilds@gmail.com, (954) 854-7764, www.joanechilds.com

Learn More About Joan E Childs, LCSW,
Life and Relationship Coach and Business Mediator