Life coaching is also about ...

Today I once again met a lovely woman in Cambridge who made the assumption that coaching is about having goals - “ahh don’t you have to be focused and have a goal in mind?” or “oh isn’t that all about getting to your goal”, well a lot of my clients do want to make changes in their busy lives by setting or creating new goals.

However I also have clients who –

1. Don’t have any goals in mind

2. Have had enough of working towards goals

3. Really don’t want to anything to do with goals

So Life Coaching for me is not just about goals, focus and achievements. A very important part of what I do is giving people time to work out how they got to here and how we move on to where they want to be and sometimes it's just about understanding behaviour and patterns.

For example one client I shall call Jane contacted me and we met for two hours every month for six months. She was based in the South East and after University had taken the best job offered that was many years ago, in the mean time she had experienced two bereavements, three promotions, a company car – she was doing very well. So what did she want with coach?

Well she wanted to be looking towards the next three and final years of her career, she was going through a period of transition to early retirement or rather a new and very different life.

In her feedback she wrote that the coaching was “ purely time for me to redefine what my career and life was about … “

We did not talk about her career performance, goals or plans. She used the space literally for time to think out loud. It is my view that she used the time to really take another perspective and assimilate the bereavements, how fast her career had moved and many more events that had not been given any attention over the last twenty years but she felt were significant.

We all experience deep and moving times without any chance to really think about the impact of what’s happened to ourselves and our loved ones. We can be very hard and judgmental on ourselves at such times.

Having a coach is like having a confidante, a sounding board, a collaborative partner to support you through life’s changes. I used Jane to highlight the wide spectrum of clients I work with and to show that it’s not all about goals sometimes it’s just about having the space and time to be and in turn gaining an understanding oneself.