7 Ways Coaching Changed My Life
One of my former clients asked me to speak to a group of business owners about the ways that coaching benefits business owners, and life in general. I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to outline a few simple ways that coaching helps transform lives, and to talk about how it has impacted my life personally.
Before I found coaching, I was almost always stressed. I felt stuck in a job that was no longer for me, and I was ignoring my intuition on many levels. I didn’t believe it was possible for me to have a job that didn’t drain every ounce of energy from my brain, body and soul.
I struggled with people pleasing and having terrible boundaries. I didn’t know how to say “no” to anyone, especially those who I loved. And I didn’t really believe it was possible for me to have great relationships.
I was a third-grade teacher from my late twenties into my late thirties. I loved my work but knew that it wasn’t what I wanted to do forever. I loved being a teacher for about seven years, but after that I started feeling like I was meant to do something different. And my personal life was nonexistent. I spent all of my time working or else recovering from work. I thought it was because my job took all of my energy, but through coaching I learned that there were plenty of other reasons.
I finally got a coach, and with her help, changed my entire life. I quit my job, started a business, learned to enjoy dating, recognized relationship patterns that were causing me problems, found true love and got married, and reclaimed my health after years of neglecting it.
7 Ways Coaching Can Change Your Life
1. Coaching Helps You Declutter Your Mind
When you have a coach, you have a person whose job is to listen to you completely. There aren’t many other areas of life where you get the be the full focus of someone’s complete attention. Coaching is much different than friendship or personal relationships, because a coach is just there for you and exploring your thoughts, feelings and ideas. It’s like having an exploration partner to explore the parts of your mind that you haven’t looked at yet.
When you are busy juggling all the areas of life it’s easy for your mind to get cluttered with to-do lists and worries, stress and fears. This is how your dreams can accidentally get put on the back burner.
Coaching is like an organizing system for your mind. You can start by decluttering all the fears, doubts, worries and stressful thoughts that are in the way of your peace of mind.
2. Coaching Helps You Find Clarity
After you and your coach declutter your mind a bit, you will feel lighter and clearer. Once you are able to declutter the things and thoughts that you don’t want, you’ll be better able to figure out what you do want.
You’ll find clarity on what you really want, and why you want it.
You’ll find clarity on what’s in the way of getting what you want.
You’ll get clarity on how to solve your problems and see how your challenges are opportunities to grow.
3. Coaching Helps You Reframe Your Problems
This is one of my favorite ways that coaching changes lives. It helped me see that what I thought were problems were really just ways life was teaching me what I needed to know, as long as I paid attention and learned from them.
Coaching helped me recognize my patterns, which helped me identify the beliefs that were the real problem.
For example, I thought my problem was that I was stuck in a job that drained my energy and that I was not going to be able ever change careers.
The real problem was my belief that I was stuck. I thought that being stuck was a real thing, but it’s actually not the truth. I thought that I didn’t have any other options, choices or possibilities, but I have learned from coaching that being stuck isn’t real. I figured out how to get unstuck, and from that figuring out process I learned invaluable life lessons that helped me grow and develop into a better version of myself.
Coaching helps reframe problems because it shows you how your beliefs create your patterns and habits, and these create your actions. If you are able to identify the beliefs and feelings surrounding your problems, you can then learn from them, expand your mind, and change your path.
4. Coaching Teaches You How to Listen to Your Intuition
My #1 problem before coaching can be traced back to the fact that I was ignoring my intuition in all the areas of my life where I was struggling.
I was ignoring it because I thought other people knew more or better than I did.
But from coaching, I learned to never ever ignore my intuition. It always knows best, no matter what.
Looking back now I can see that every time I thought something terrible happened to me, I had ignored my intuition. I had dismissed myself.
And because of coaching and learning the truth, I will never again ignore my intuition.
5. Coaching Helps You See What Beliefs Have Been Holding You Hostage
Sometimes beliefs hold you hostage without your permission. And I used to believe that my life had to have some level of struggle and suffering.
I thought that life was meant to be hard, and I had to tolerate the things that I didn’t really want to tolerate.
These beliefs were not true, and I no longer tolerate things that I don’t want to tolerate.
Coaching helps unravel beliefs that you might not see as optional. You can choose new beliefs and then your life starts to match your new belief system.
6. Coaching Helps You Manage Stress
Coaching helped me to put my stress in perspective. I didn’t realize that I was allowing stressful things to happen to me without my permission.
But coaching helped me see that everyone has a stress response system.
We either react to it, and think that we have to tolerate it, or we can learn to respond to it and self-regulate.
What does this look like?
It looks like noticing what triggers stress. What triggers your fight, flight or freeze?
What makes you angry? What makes you want to run away or escape? What do you avoid?
Coaching helps you to recognize your stress triggers and figure out what works best for you to respond to them, so you never have to “react” to them or tolerate them again.
When you learn how to respond to stress, you learn how to take care of yourself better. And when you learn how to take care of yourself better, your life gets healthier and happier, and you can focus on your dreams and goals instead of your problems.
7. Coaching Helps You Create a Life You Love
Before I had coaching, I felt powerless in some ways. I felt stuck and thought the glimmers of the life I wanted was too hard or impossible to achieve. I was detached from my own power.
I know that every person is a channel of infinite power. We all have this internal power, but sometimes it gets blocked, mostly by beliefs that keep us trapped.
Coaching helps unlock this internal power by unblocking whatever it is that’s cluttering up the channels of internal power.
My hope is that someday every person will get to experience the lifechanging magic of coaching. This would uplift the world.