What in the world do I need a Life Coach for???
The reasons why having a Life Coach can save your life
By
Christopher A. Pinckley
©2012 Christopher Pinckley Smashwords Edition
Chapter 2 What is a life coach?
Chapter 3 The Power of Decision
Chapter 4 The Power of Attention
Chapter 6 Relationships and Romance
Chapter 8 How a life coach is different from a psychotherapist
Chapter 9 Suppressed emotional charges
Chapter 10 Creating a life vs. Creating a living
Introduction
When I very first heard the term ‘life coach’ I have to say that I thought it was one of the cheesiest inventions which I had ever heard anyone come up with. A Life Coach??? What new concoction is this? What sort of scam have they come up with this time? Additionally I thought to myself, what nerve someone has to think they can coach another person on their own life?!
Needless to say I was, at the very least skeptical, and at the most I was annoyed at the seemingly endless capacity for human audacity in this world. Thus it took me a long time to investigate life coaching as a potential career choice as well as investigate people who were claiming to be thus.
And, I found an entire array of individuals who were calling themselves ‘Life Coaches’. There were people who appeared to me to be very qualified, with degrees, certifications, and most importantly were old enough to have some actual life experience (go figure!). Then, there were the polar opposite which included kids in their early twenties with a single ‘certification’ (certification in life???) and zero life experience who were also making the same claim, to be able to coach you on your life. Wow, I had to take a minute to decide if this was a path that I really wanted to walk down!
Up until the point that I decided I wanted to be a Life Coach I had been a professional personal trainer and rehabilitation specialist (someone who works on people with injuries, generally post rehab after their insurance runs out). I had been doing that for around 15 years and had run my business www.holisticfitness4u.com in the San Francisco Bay Area for around 7 of those years. Basically, I was no stranger to one on one coaching and many of my clients had already been receiving life coaching from me for most of those years under the auspices of ‘personal training’. In 2008 I began volunteering on www.allexperts.com in a few different categories centering around personal empowerment and creating what you want in your life. My success, excellent ratings, and most importantly the joy that I derived from it began to steer me in a new direction. I realized that I really enjoyed helping people work through problems in their lives as well as restoring meaning and bringing fulfillment.
I began to see the profession of Life Coaching through different eyes, not just the cheesy hype that you see about how to become a millionaire, but more importantly how to help people in crisis and find meaning in their lives. The more people I helped on AllExperts the more I became convinced that there was a real, tangible career in becoming a Life Coach; but the type of Life Coaching that really helped people.
Receive 50% off of your first session by emailing rc101coaching@gmail.com with the heading ‘Why LifeCoach?’ in the subject line. Please email me at rc101coaching@gmail.com or go to http://www.christopherpinckley.com.
The world is a much different place than it used to be and now more than ever it has become important for you to understand that you are the creator of your own reality. There is tremendous opportunity for those of you who will be able to think outside the box. This new economy and newly emerging world is one of uncertainty and tremendous opportunity for anyone who can challenge themselves to see a larger picture. That picture is one where there are less and less conglomerates and huge businesses and more and more small, independently owned and operated businesses. This is a self help, self serve, do it yourself world that we are entering into and the more you begin to realize that now the quicker you can create the life that you have been dreaming of and capitalize on this newly emerging trend.
So what is your first step?
Decide what you want to do. What is your dream, what is your passion? What is it that you would like to provide people with? How do you want to live your life? Who do you want to live it with? Where do you want to live it? How do you want to spend your time? What are your natural talents and gifts?
No idea?
That’s ok because this is actually what a Life Coach is for. Yes, you heard me right there. A Life Coach can help you to figure out who you are, what your message is, how you want to deliver it, who you want to do it with, and how you want to live your life while you do it.
I can’t tell you the number of people that I have come across who know they want something more out of life, but have no idea what that is or how they can go about doing it. That’s where a Life Coach can come into play quite nicely. A Life Coach can give you direction when you have none. Life Coaches can actually help you to construct and pave the way towards creating your own business, marketing yourself, and developing your brand. Additionally, a Life Coach can help you to stay accountable and motivated on the path towards creating your vision as well. A good Life Coach can help you begin to see a much larger picture; one where you are living an expanded version of yourself that you had only previously dreamed of.
Perhaps most importantly is that the right Life Coach can and will help you to find your place in this new world and fulfill your destiny to be of service to the people on this planet.
If you were to ask me what I think the most important thing that a Life Coach can do for you I would say, ‘motivate and inspire you’.
#1 Motivator
Therefore, the very first and perhaps most important thing a Life Coach can do for you is to motivate you. This happens via a number of different ways. The first thing you receive is unconditional support from your coach. When was the last time you had that? Ummm…I’m guessing that it’s been awhile since you’ve experienced that one, yes? Many people have no idea what that feels like, but let me tell you, it’s motivating! It can and will completely inspire you when you receive unconditional support from another human being.
Next, you receive inspiration. This means that your Life Coach will begin to help you to see a larger picture than you have previously been able to see on your own. Let me tell you, two people can almost always see a much, much bigger picture than one person can by themselves. Plus, when you put two people together who have the same exact goal (to help YOU) it amplifies the power, not just doubles it. In other words you will begin to enlarge your vision of yourself and hurdle past obstacles in your path that have perhaps been there for your entire life.
A good Life Coach will show up and be there for you through thick and thin, both the good times and the bad, thus proving themselves to be a reliable and continuous presence in your life. Additionally, a good Life Coach will inspire you to think outside the box and see a much bigger version of yourself.
#2 Accountability
Let’s face it, the reason that you haven’t done all of the things that you want or need to do in order to improve your life is that there is no accountability factor. In other words, since you do not have to check-in with anybody then it becomes easier to let things slide. And then, later, after about five years of your life have gone by you realize that you are still exactly where you were, which is not where you want to be. When you have someone with whom you have to be accountable to, guess what happens?! You get it done! That’s right; you are about 100 times more likely to get something done if you know that you are going to have to be accountable to another person for it.
A good Life Coach will help you to be accountable by making you a) get it done or b) be forced to explain why you didn’t get it done. And, nobody wants to have to explain why they didn’t get something done, so you’ll probably get it done.
# 3 Problem Solver
Have you ever known anyone who never had a problem? Really, the answer is ‘no’. What you may be mistakenly thinking is that you do know someone who never had a problem when the reality is that you actually know someone who is good at solving problems. Do you understand the difference? One doesn’t exist (people with no problems) and the other is someone who is adept at staying in the flow of life. But, how did they get good at solving problems?
Well, it’s probably not because they had a Life Coach, or wait a minute…is it?!
Actually, many of these people who seem to be good at solving problems did actually have, not necessarily a Life Coach, but a mentor. I’ve personally read many books in the self-help genre that, at some point, tell you to get a mentor. However, what I found out is that there are no mentors to be found! I tried to find and locate a mentor for myself for almost 20 years and I never found one! I found success partners, groups, and spiritual friends, but I never found a mentor. Never. Mentors, good mentors, successful mentors, are hard to come by. Thus it is my feeling that you have to be extremely lucky to get that kind of support in this world.
You know what happens when you get a mentor? You become very good at problem solving and getting into the flow of life. In general, people who have mentors become very successful and usually also adapt the same mentality and methods as their mentor. Wow, that would be nice, eh?
A Life Coach might not be as awesome as having a mentor, or it could be better! You see a mentor might come for free and help you to mold your career path into a formula that is already working for them. However, a Life Coach can actually do something better for you, which is to find out YOUR own true calling. A Life Coach can help you to solve the various problems and puzzles in your life that you cannot do on your own. In fact, that is one of the specialties of a Life Coach which is to help you to solve what has previously been to you ‘unsolvable’.
If you are undecided you’ve actually decided not to decide!
It sounds funny, but it’s really true. When you remain undecided about something you’ve actually made the decision not to decide upon something. And then, guess what happens? You get the ‘default’ reality creation in your life. This gives you a big load of poop. Another way of saying this is that when you remain undecided the Universe will bring you nothing special. You’ll get more of the same of what you’re already getting, and unless you’re Donald Trump, Bill Gates, Jack Canfield, Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins, or Oprah Winfrey, then more of the same might not be so fun.
Here is the trick about decision; you do not have to figure out the entire rest of your life. Yay, the pressure is off! Instead, figure out what you want RIGHT NOW. What do you want to create in your life right now? Don’t know? Guess who can help you with that? A good Life Coach! Yep.
A good life coach can help you to break it all down into steps and phases of your life. This does a couple of things; first, it helps you to get clear on what you want right now. Because, often we find that what you want ‘right now’ is very different from what you want ‘five years from now’. Sometimes right now you just need to generate some capital. Sometimes what you want right now is to get creative and try out something new. Sometimes what you need right now is to get clear on what you want out of your relationship with your significant other.
Getting clear on what you want and why you want it is very important and your life coach can help you with that.
I’m sure by now you’ve heard the phrase ‘where your attention goes your energy flows’, yes? Well, if not, then you are hearing it now. It’s true too! If your attention is on the things in life that you do not want i.e. down trending economy, pollution, energy crisis, unpaid bills, debts, relationship problems, financial problems, health problems, and any other unmet needs then it’s possible that you could actually be keeping yourself stuck in a rut. This happens because your attention to things actually entrains you to a certain mental/emotional state of being that keeps you unconsciously acting out certain behaviors that lead to certain results, over and over again.
You really do want to be careful about what you give your attention to. I’m also not suggesting here that you bury your head in the sand or ignore local or global issues as they emerge. I am telling you that the more you focus on things that bring about negative emotions within you the more you will create your reality in a negative way. That is the truth. So, instead of dwelling on the state of the world, acknowledge it and move on. You are not going to solve anything overnight anyway, are you? All by yourself? No, you’re not. Now if it’s your mission to solve the global economy or end pollution then by all means, focus away! But, then you will most likely be focused on solutions instead of problems and enjoy doing what you are doing. This is different than somebody who watches CNN or Fox News all day then gets depressed and decides to emotionally dump it on someone else and spread this negative energy disease. What is happening here is that you are focused on something which creates negative emotion within you and simultaneously not taking any empowered action to create a solution to that which you are focused upon which would help you to feel positively about it. So, if you are going to take action, then focus on it! If you are not, then don’t! Again, if you are taking physical action steps on changing something that is a potentially negative thing in this world then you will actually begin to feel good about it. This also means that this could be your ‘calling’, so to speak.
However, most people who focus on global problems or crime or pollution are actually engaged in the further polluting of the environment with toxic negative emotions. Anger, resentment, and complaining do not create positive change without some form of action steps to back them up. For example, the people of Egypt were fed up, sick and tired, and done with feeling so entirely subverted. So, what did they do? They took action, massive action! This is an instance where anger and resentment led to a positive action that helped to change millions of lives. They didn’t sit around complaining about it, but instead they revolted!
Here is yet another way to look at it; you can never feel bad enough to help someone else. Do you understand the meaning here? In other words, you can never feel guilty or angry enough about someone else’s misfortune in life to actually benefit them in any way. However, what you can do is get your own life in order, make a huge bundle of cash, and then donate it to agencies and companies who are actively engaged in making a difference in these lives.
So which person would you rather be? The angry, guilty person who stews about all the misfortunes in the world, but never actually does anything about it? Or, the happy, fulfilled person who has money to donate to causes that they feel passionate about? If you chose the latter, then a Life Coach can help you get it done!
A Life Coach can help you to put your attention on what you want to create in your life, but more importantly, KEEP it on what you want to create in your life. Remember, anyone can come up with a good idea, but only 1 in 1000 can keep their attention focused on this idea to the actual completion of it.
How many times a day do you catch yourself saying negative things to yourself?
Maybe the question should be; Are you aware of how many times a day you are saying negative things to yourself? My guess is that you are not aware of this little (big) event and the number of times a day that it occurs. Most people have a certain amount of unconscious internal dialogue that runs all day long like a recording going off in their brain that tells them they are; not good enough, not doing enough, need to do better, and worse it then berates them for the inevitable end result of all of these self destructive statements. It’s a vicious cycle that perpetuates itself subconsciously through an unconscious mechanism.
So, how in the heck do you get rid of it? Or, how do you overcome it?
Well, there are as many techniques as there are people teaching them. You can try hypnosis, subliminal audios, meditation, breath work, and taking consistent action steps every day for starters. But, my finding is that time and again after all is said and done that you will return to your previous unconscious mental state of not feeling deserving and worthy of achieving what you want to achieve in life.
This is where a Life Coach can come in real handy. A good Life Coach can and will actually entrain you to higher mental/emotional degree of deserving and worthiness. In fact, even the act of hiring a Life Coach is in itself an affirmation of your own sense of deserving and worthiness; often people begin to become more productive by simply hiring a Life Coach. It’s a similar phenomenon to people who used to hire me to be there personal trainer would actually begin to clean up their diet and start doing cardiovascular work before the first session had even started.
Much in the same way when you hire a Life Coach you will begin to take yourself and your life more seriously and most likely start making positive changes right away.
A good Life Coach will help you to stop stopping yourself by helping you to feel more deserving and worthy of what you want and help you to question limiting beliefs about yourself. A good Life Coach will help you to identify some of these self destructive patterns of internal dialogue and begin to entrain you to a higher degree of deserving and worthiness.
Many times what is really behind someone’s apparent life issues is actually an issue with their romantic relationship. Have you ever heard the expression, ‘how you do one thing is how you do everything’? This is especially true of your romantic relationship with your wife, husband, spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, or life partner. The reason this is so is because this is the issue that is closest to your heart and your heart dominates your reality creation. In other words, the wants and needs of the heart will often times dictate how you are feeling in your life holistically. What this means is that if you are having relationship problems your entire life can become chaotic and disorganized. Conversely, if your relationship is going really well then the opposite can be true; you may feel on top of the world and like you can achieve anything.
A good Life Coach will help you to identify any potential relationship issues and/or if you need to create a relationship in your life. In other words, your Life Coach may be able to help you to determine if your present relationship is getting in your way and perhaps help you to fix it. Or, your Life Coach may be able to help you to determine if a relationship is something that your heart is yearning for and how to create a healthy and lasting one for yourself.
Often times it is the desire to be in a relationship that can be problematic and lead you to continuous cycles where you are getting into the same relationships over and over again. This desire may be authentic, but you are not taking the time to heal and/or do not feel the worthiness to have a healthy relationship. A good Life Coach can identify these patterns and begin to help you to heal the negative emotions creating this pattern unconsciously within yourself.
Your romantic relationship can determine the overall quality of your life and so is very important to understand. A good Life Coach can help you to get clear about what is working for you and what is not, thus saving you valuable time and energy (and potential heartache).
If, for example, you are having relationship difficulties at home then your valuable life energy is now being diverted (unconsciously) to worry, anxiety, and/or resentment towards your partner. Now your ability to sell yourself or show up in the work place fully empowered is compromised. You are no longer as effective at being creative, problem solving, and communicating. Depending upon the degree of the emotional turmoil that you are having with your partner, you may become completely ineffective in your ability to carry on in your job or entrepreneurial pursuits. In this case, you have allowed your desire for romance to compromise your ability to create your dreams and you need intervention.
As the desire for a loving relationship is a valid one I am not suggesting that you forgo having a relationship in lieu of the work that you do. However, I am suggesting that a good life coach will be able to help you determine if your current relationship or perhaps more importantly, the way in which you seek out a relationship, is toxic to you. Then, with some assistance from your life coach you may be able to either fix your relationship or have the courage to leave it if it does not serve your Highest Good.
One of the best reasons why hiring a Life Coach could be a good idea is if you have a lot of good ideas yourself, but you never seem to be able to execute any of them. In other words you have a lot of unfinished clutter on your desk that doesn’t make you any money or fulfill your dreams and desires. What a life coach can help you to do is reprioritize what needs to get done and what can be discarded in your life process. In other words, reprioritizing your ‘to do’ list can actually help you to become more effective by motivating you to finish what you start.
When you are able to effectively finish everything that you start it does two things: the first thing that happens is that you begin to elevate your sense of deserving and worthiness. In essence it’s like saying ‘I am worthy of building my dreams’. The second thing that happens is that you begin to reap the rewards that only completed projects can bring you. Perhaps it’s not something that generates a lot of money, but instead it begins to build your platform and reputation as an ‘executor’ (someone who is able to execute and finish projects; someone who is able to get the job done).
In essence, when you prioritize your life ‘to do list’ you are positioning yourself into a space where you can complete everything that you start. This, in turn, helps you to take yourself more seriously, and guess what happens when you do that? Everyone else begins to take you more seriously too. This is a wanted outcome.
How a Life Coach is different from a Psychotherapist
If you have been reading carefully enough then you may begin to wonder if I am implying that a Life Coach can do the same things for you as a Psychotherapist. My answer is YES!!! In fact, a good life coach (and I mean GOOD) can help you to quantum leap past all of your emotional unhealed trauma to create a larger than life, holistic picture of what you have been dreaming of your entire life. Sound good? No, it sounds GREAT you mean!
The sole purpose of the life coach is not to help you work through your unhealed childhood, but a good life coach is equipped with tools to help you begin to release the suppressed emotional charges from childhood (the single source and cause of all suffering, one may argue).
Should a life coach be used as a substitute for a psychotherapist?
Not necessarily, as a good psychotherapist has a multitude of tools and life experience to really zoom in on and focus upon your major life issues. Sometimes there is just too much emotional trauma that a person needs to work through and thus the psychotherapist may be the best route as this is their specialty. Another way of saying this is that the best way to address big issues is to hire someone who will exclusively focus upon that specific issue. And, if you have a lot of unresolved mental/emotional conflict then a psychotherapist is the way to go.
Conversely, I myself have been privy to working with clients who have had some major unresolved issues in life. You could easily argue that they should have gone to see a psychotherapist and not a life coach like myself. However, my life experience combined with years and years of self-work and self-study has given me a unique perspective into emotional trauma. And thus, I am sometimes able to help people to break boundaries that may normally have taken a decade or more, in weeks or days.
This type of thing should be handled on a case by case basis and not over generalized. I know amazing psychotherapists and amazing life coaches so it’s a matter of what you are guided to and why.
It is my personal opinion (shared by many in higher level consciousness circles) that the root of all suffering is caused by suppressed emotional charges from childhood (or unexpressed emotional suffering from childhood, also known as fragmented aspects of the psyche).
What happens is that, as a child (even as young as ‘just born’ or ‘one’ or ‘two’ or ‘three’ etc) you are generally unable to verbally express yourself. Thus, you only know what you feel as your intellect is largely undeveloped at this stage of your development. This means that if something does not feel good you do not know why it doesn’t and also if it is something that is not supposed to be happening. Another way of saying this is that if someone is doing something to you that doesn’t feel good (as a child) you do not know how to verbally express your discomfort as well as being unaware that they are not supposed to be doing this to you. This entire scenario here is, in my humble opinion, the root of much suffering in this world.
The first thing that happens is that you environmentally imprint all of this stuff into your psyche. So, even if it’s not traumatic, you are still imprinting emotional behavioral patterns into your subconscious. Additionally, keep in mind that you do not know how to express what you are feeling and this begins the vicious cycle of unconscious reactivity. Because a good percentage of this emotional imprinting comes from the time period before you were able to think and speak you will be completely out of touch with this part of yourself.
As an example, if you had one or more parents who were depressed all of the time during the time when or around when you were born then you will integrate that emotional patterning into your psyche, subconsciously, at a level of awareness that you will remain unconscious of. And, since you were verbally unable to express or did not know how to express yourself during the time period where you imprinted it, you may feel depressed and have no idea why you do. So, instead of getting to the root of your suffering you may have hired a psychotherapist or a psychiatrist and become addicted to anti-depressants.
This brings me to one of my favorite things about life coaches: life coaches are not limited to any one type of healing modality or approach to creating the life that you deserve. Instead, a life coach can implement any number of techniques and modalities to facilitate deeper healing that, in turn, leads to the creation of the life that you want. Often times it’s not that you do not know what you want, but rather that you have mental/emotional barriers or resistance to creating what you want. A good life coach may be adept at helping you to locate suppressed emotional charges from childhood and release them, thus alleviating you from barriers of internal resistance that have kept you imprisoned within your own mind.
Creating a Life vs. Creation a Living
The last little bit that I would like to add in here is a new concept that has been around for 1,000 years or so called ‘making a life instead of making a living’. Now, of course I have created the paradox by referring to this as a new concept when it is age old, but there is a reason for this.
You see, people have gotten caught up in making a living instead of making a life. We have forgotten the simple joys of living and being. We spend our time thinking of ways to make money instead of ways to improve our lives.
We brain storm a new business idea instead of taking a walk on the beach or in nature. The reality is that the beach or nature walk may have given us the inspiration we needed to create the perfect business idea.
We put off spending time with friends and family in lieu of doggedly pursuing our goals. The reality is that these are the heart felt connections that give us the feeling of connectedness that we truly long for.
We push ourselves so hard at our work that we need to spend all of our extra money that we made on health care to repair the damage from the stress that was created by pushing ourselves so hard.
A Life Coach can come in to your life and help you to structure your life in a holistic way that feeds your Soul instead of drains it.
Hiring a life coach could be the most amazing thing that you’ve ever done for yourself!
It’s kind of like saying, “I am worth it!” In other words, you will automatically, subconsciously begin to make and create changes in your life from the simple act of hiring a life coach. Doing this is like affirming that you are worthy of creating the biggest, most amazing version of yourself in your life.
Why wait?
Even if things are going well in your life wouldn’t you like them to be going great?!
(Most life coaches will offer you a free consultation so you really have nothing to lose)
The takeaway from this little eBook is hopefully that you will begin to understand how effective and life altering it can be to have your own Life Coach. Without this kind of outside motivation and assistance you may never reach the levels of success in life that deep down you know you are worth. Everyone needs a helping hand from time to time as no one has ever succeeded in life completely on their own. So you can give yourself the helping hand that takes you to the next level by hiring your own Life Coach!
Receive 50% off of your first session by emailing rc101coaching@gmail.com with the heading ‘Why LifeCoach?’ in the subject line.