What Is Life Coaching?

Have you ever wondered, “What is life coaching?” Maybe you’ve noticed that many of your days are spent being pushed around by your desires and dislikes. You find yourself striving to find happiness and an equal desire to avoid pain.

Our conditioning determines our reactions to everyday encounters.

For example, someone says something unkind or negative. They attack you, challenge you, hurt you, or reject you. You immediately get caught up and react from conditioning, finding yourself growing angry and hurt.

It is at this very moment when you lose connection to awareness.

What is life coaching?

In life coaching, we restore our awareness to our habitual patterns of behavior that seem to hook us and take us out of the present moment.

One of the biggest reasons I incorporate meditation into my life coaching practice with my clients is to help stabilize awareness. When we are able to do that, we can experience something from the outside without being shaken or hooked by it. Instead of feeling threatened or hurt, you begin to recognize the interaction for what it is. When someone says something negative, you hear it and listen, and can let it go.

Instead, we can feel compassion toward that person who has said or done something hurtful. You can survey the situation from more of a macro view.

We all lack a certain amount of awareness. It takes practice to notice every interaction and encounter. It doesn’t help that the world around us is also filled with busyness. There is war, political strife, family struggles, deadlines, financial issues, and more. Our cell phones notify us of every little thing with a buzz or vibration keeping us in a chronic state of fight and flight. There’s little chance throughout each day for us to simply BE.

Unless we create it.

How can life coaching help?

This is where life coaching can make a huge difference in your life. Through the exploration of your interactions and reactions to life, you are able to bring awareness to the ways in which you interact with others and the ways you interact with your own internal dialog.

Life coaching gives you a birdseye view of the ways in which you tend to automatically believe your internal dialog. This dialogue tries to limit you or convince you that you aren’t worthy, good enough, smart, pretty, or kind enough.

It’s only from that awareness can you shift. Meditation coupled with life coaching allows you to settle that internal dialog in such a way that you bring presence to every encounter. In the stillness, all of the internal strife you’ve pushed down over the years begin to bubble up to the surface to be examined. With life coaching, you have a mentor, guide, and spiritual friend who can help you navigate whatever arises. From there, you can begin to create the life you envision and perhaps have put on hold for far too long.

Try these practices this week:

Determine for yourself how aware you are. As you engage in your daily life, examine your reactions, your feelings, and thoughts.
Do your mind and heart remain open when you encounter something or someone you find unpleasant?
Are you thrown into negative emotions by your attractions and aversions?
Or can you remain in a clear, steady presence in all sorts of diverse situations?

Consider life coaching as a way to cultivate the stability in awareness needed to free yourself of conditioning and reactivity. It is a tremendous support to have a guide, mentor, and friend to help you walk the path. If you would like to find out more about life coaching and what I do, check out my website to learn more!