As I progressed in my career as a fitness professional, I realised that while clients would come to me with a “thing” (losing weight, getting fit, etc), it turned out that it was very rarely JUST the “thing”. Clients would come to me with a stated aim, or a goal, and we’d start working towards that. What quite often happened though, was that my clients would comment casually about how they felt about their bodies, or what they thought might be stopping them from achieving their life goals, or their relationship with food, etc … and I realised that if I wanted to help these clients, not only with the “thing” that they’d come to me about in the first place, but also the “background and context of the “thing”, the drivers of the “thing”, and what may be stopping a client from achieving the “thing”, then I’d better educate myself properly and work towards some qualifications.
Over the years, I’ve worked hard to become a qualified Life Coach, and I’ve also qualified in a number of counselling techniques (Cognative Behavioural Therapy and Person-Centred Counselling) so that I can better support clients.
It’s not only PT clients who benefit from my skills and experience in this type of coaching. I also have seperate Life Coaching clients who have a whole range of issues they’d like help with, from career changes, to life decisions, choices to be made and changes of circumstances.
It’s important to note that Life Coaching isn’t about telling the client what they should do in any given circumstance, (although many clients do wish it were that easy!) but rather a collaborative process through which clients can identify their end-point and we can figure out the steps to get there together.
