Life Coaching: the secret to achieve your goals

A branch of coaching that deals with all those objectives of our daily life.

Life Coaching is a methodology that seeks the maximum personal development and transformation of people. and the transformation of people and, for this, it generates changes of perspective and increases their motivation, commitment and responsibility.

As an accompaniment for change, it allows the understanding and learning of this process, and promotes the modification of cognitive, emotional and behavioral habits, helping in the expansion of one's own potential and capacity for action regarding the acquisition of personal goals.

Discovering Life Coaching

Life Coaching pursues the well-being of people in different areas of life, working on the personal mission, individual goals and needs, life projects, self-motivation, different strategies for change, etc.

This week, Mª Teresa Mata, psychologist at the Instituto de Asistencia Psicológica y Psiquiátrica Mensalus, presents Life Coaching based on a parallelism with sports.

Is sports training the same as personal resources training?

We train with the purpose of improving our physical and mental performance. For example, when it comes to sport, we train to beat a record because we associate success with preparation ("I go running three times a week to be able to participate in the race", "the coach is pushing us to qualify for the championships", "I swim for half an hour to build Muscle tone in my arms and back", etc.).

This success is different for each of us depending on the objective and the demand (for one person success means finishing the race; for another it means getting on the podium and being among the top three). Even so, there will always be a routine behind each goal, either to achieve a time or to maintain a state of body-mind well-being ("I train to do the marathon in less than three and a half hours"/"I train to keep my back strong and not have any discomfort").

The same goes for personal resources. If our desire is to improve "X" aspect (for example, to stop relating at work from a passive communicative style) it may be helpful to seek some kind of training that will provide us with the tools we are looking for to achieve our goal (to be more assertive).

However, in life as in sports, this does not happen overnight. Integrating learning from practice and repetition allows us to see ourselves in new situations and feel different. When our perception of ourselves changes, it changes the way we relate to each other.

How can we train personal resources?

Training, in part, is already provided by life experience itself. School is training, work is training, leisure time is training, family gatherings are training, moments of solitude are also training, and so on. Every time we live an experience we learn something that prepares us for the next moment. Every moment is useful information; whether we have a better or worse time, we get something out of it.

Even so, we don't always find the resources we want in the daily routine. Some specific objectives may require extra learning. For example, following on from the situation we have discussed (to stop being passive at work), this extra learning could take place through a group workshop or an individual coaching process aimed at increasing the ability to set limits and say no.

More specifically, what kind of work are we talking about?

In this case, training with a professional would help the person to make more flexible those thoughts/beliefs that make it difficult to be assertive, increase the ability to express his/her opinion at different times and with different colleagues, improve the self-critical voice that detracts value and confidence to his/her person, increase awareness of one's own strengths, etc.

Is coaching only associated with skills training in the workplace?

Coaching is a discipline that brings us closer to the achievement of objectives that allow us to develop in different areas of our lives, not only in the professional one. It is true that the word coaching is associated especially to the training of competencies related to leadership and team management, but coaching is much more.

Specifically, Life Coaching focuses on the training of skills to cope with daily life, that is, to improve the management we have over our emotions and become more efficient people. For this reason, the famous emotional intelligence trainings (also considered coaching processes) have become valuable life trainings. The "lessons" that each one extracts from the dynamics experienced are transformed into mottos for living instead of surviving.

And what kind of audience is a skills training or coaching process for?

Life Coaching is especially indicated for those people who are emotionally stable and enjoy good mental health but, at the same time, wish to improve some aspect of their lives.

Many times the change that the person is looking for goes hand in hand with leaving certain comfort zones (not as comfortable as they seem). To achieve this, an external guide can set the action plan; this someone is the life coach.

Sometimes we believe that we should be the ones to achieve the challenge, without anyone's help. When this happens, are we making things difficult for ourselves?

There is a commonly held belief that goes like this: "If I can do it without any help, it has more value. I just have to be able to.

The question is: Why?

Do the resources we apply and/or acquire cease to be ours, does success cease to be ours? Making things easier for ourselves helps us to invest our vital energy in what we decide instead of wasting it in the attempt.

And what kind of tasks does this guide we call coach or life skills trainer perform?

The coach accompanies the person already committed to his or her goal.

Coaching is a process that seeks to overcome some exact aspect. This is why making the goal concrete is so important. In fact, this is one of the great secrets of a good coach: to break down the objective until it becomes quantifiable and highly specific. People who start a life coaching process are surprised when they come to a first session and, with the help of the psychologist coach, give shape to the reason for the consultation with which they come.

Having said that, the coach has the function of accompanying and insisting on the process of reflection and introspection of the individual. It is essential that the person raises new questions: solutions not tried, new ways of doing and undoing.

Why is it so important that the person is already committed to his or her goal? Is this always the case?

If not, it is impossible to start a coaching process. This does not mean, as we said, that the person knows exactly what goal he or she wants to work on. There is an idea and a need, but the objective is not drawn in detail (that's why he is looking for help).

This first step of specifying provides the coachee (client) with the main clues on what aspects he will work on and what map he will follow, steps that, together with the coach, he will decide and revise throughout the training.

Moreover, the commitment is so important that coach and coachee close the pact in a written document that, symbolically, reminds the protagonist of his role, an active role that, with the help of the coach, will work to assume the objective.

• If you are interested in improving your wellbeing and want to benefit from the practice of Life Coaching, we invite you to find out more about the Life Coaching Workshop: "Where you are and where you want to go" at Instituto Mensalus (Barcelona). To do so, just click on this link.