Life Coaching is a relatively new profession centered around helping individuals find empowerment and fulfillment in their personal and professional lives. Coaches are professionals trained to provide support to individuals in accessing and enhancing the resources, skills, potential and creativity that are inherent in everyone, yet untapped in many. A good coach can be a voice of wisdom and encouragement, your own personal cheerleader, a safe haven in which to explore and grow as well as someone to hold you accountable and push you outside your comfort zone. Coaches may specialize in particular areas including: personal, relationship, business and/or career development.
Overview and Credentials
There are several different training programs and coaching institutes available, though no official regulatory standard currently exists. Additionally, there is a high degree of confusion around the terms 'certification' and 'credentialing' as used within the coaching industry and there exists a wide variety of certificate and credential designations, the status of which are still in flux.
The International Coach Federation, self-proclaimed as the largest worldwide not-for-profit professional association of coaches, in an attempt to self-regulate the coaching industry, has developed a system of credentialing coaches that includes specified number of hours of coach-specific training, number of hours of coaching experience, and proof of ability to coach at or above defined standards for each credentialing level. The credentialing levels defined by the International Coach Federation are Associate Certified Coach (ACC), Professional Certified Coach (PCC), and Master Certified Coach (MCC). Coaches credentialed by the ICF and members of the ICF, regardless of whether they are credentialed, agree to abide by a code of ethics.
The ICF also provides accreditation of coach training programs that are deemed by that organization to meet defined professional standards and agree to continuing oversight.
With roots in executive coaching, which itself drew on techniques developed in management consulting and leadership training, life coaching also draws from a wide variety of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, career counseling, mentoring, and numerous other types of counseling. The coach applies mentoring, values assessment, behavior modification, behavior modeling, goal-setting, and other techniques in assisting clients. Coaches are to be distinguished from counselors, whether counselors in psychotherapy or other careers.
Specializations
Coaches tend to specialize in one or more of several areas: career coaching, transition coaching, life or personal coaching, executive coaching, small business coaching, systemic coaching and organizational or corporate coaching. As the internet has grown, life coaching has greatly expanded its online presence. Many life coaching organizations now offer online coaching as well as coaching over the telephone.
Relationship Coaching
Most life coaching is to help individuals reach individual goals. Coaching people to enjoy better relationships, with parents, partners and children, or with team members and managers, needs skills, experience and maturity that younger coaches may lack
Systemic coaching increases the adaptability and survival potential of relationships. Systemic coaching helps people attain relationship goals and their individual goals. Individual coaching can be embedded within relationship coaching.
Coaching vs. Psychotherapy
Coaching is not therapy. Like a therapist, a coach does not necessarily tell you what to do but rather helps you discover the answer for yourself. However, therapy is traditionally concerned with the process of uncovering and healing the past in order to move forward. Coaching, on the otherhand, begins in the present and focuses on helping you move forward more quickly and with more clarity and understanding that you may have had alone
Controversy
There is some controversy surrounding life coaching, primarily because of its current unregulated, unstandardized nature. Critics assert that the practice of life coaching amounts to little more than a method of practicing psychotherapy without any restrictions, oversight, or regulation.
However, the legislatures of Colorado have ceased to pursue this kind of a request after a hearing on the matter, asserting that coaching is unlike therapy in that it does not focus on examining nor diagnosing the past, instead focusing on effecting change in a client's current and future behavior.