A great description of how an individual can feel within the coaching journey. Thanks Deanna, you’re great!

Everybody has a ‘to-do ‘list, right?
There are the daily ones – pick up dry cleaning, buy stamps, call so and so etc.

But most people also have a life ‘to-do list’ that maybe one day they’ll get round to – lose weight, travel world, write a book, start own business etc. These are the kind of things that could dramatically improve your life in some way, so what stops us from achieving our bigger dreams and goals? Obviously there are practical reasons such as children, money, school term times, money etc. (Did I mention money?) But when do the real reasons become excuses and a kind of self sabotage? What’s stopping you actually doing the things that you’ve been putting on the back burner?

I went to visit my friend Beth who is a life coach. In simple terms, this isn’t counselling or therapy, it’s a way to help you try and turn your dreams and ambition into practical reality.

In six structured sessions, a life coach can help you to reassess your priorities and accelerate the process of you realising your ambitions – after all, you’d have got round to it yourself anyway, one day,wouldn’t you? Coaching aims to help you change your whys? to why not’s? And your ‘I’ll do it later’, to ‘I’ll do it now.’

Have you ever taken the time out to sit down and work out exactly what small changes you could make to improve the quality of your life and then made a plan of action to make that happen?
Booking a course with a life coach helps you to focus. Beth uses visualisation exercises and other techniques to help shift your brain from thinking in the abstract to understanding that you can make things possible, starting now.

People put up all sorts of barriers and make lots of excuses to stop them moving forward. Mine were quite simple but big enough to have formed a blockage to personal progress. I’d had a couple of children and lost the structure and purpose of a working day which lead to weight gain and loss of professional self-esteem. I didn’t have the confidence to get new projects off the ground.

I was incredibly lucky to have found Beth who happens to have connections in our mutual field so was able to give me practical support and introductions as well as coaching. I went to visit her at her house for my six sessions, which were held over a few months. I did a lot of talking whilst Beth filtered out the nonsense, helping me to focus on what I was actually trying to achieve and come up with a more practical plan to go about it.

These sessions take place over a period of time significant enough to help you acknowledge small changes happening in your life. That’s another thing people don’t do enough, take time out to acknowledge the small victories and see how they form together and gather real momentum to affect significant and positive change.
The sessions are really an investment in your own future but it’s not a magic cure. It takes hard work in the form of self analysis, honesty and goal setting and then the courage to apply the changes which only you can do.

Beth’s a good listener but she’s also a straight talker and she clearly gets genuine pleasure from helping people become empowered enough to realise their own dreams. Change doesn’t happen overnight but I can see my life having improved step by step since my coaching experience with Beth and now I know what I have to change to achieve the rest of my ambition.