4 Surprising Things You Can Learn from a Free Life Coaching Course
Inspire action within yourself and others.
During the first weekend of January (this post was originally written in 2016 FYI) I thought I’d be open minded and take up a free weekend life coaching course I’d seen advertised online. Within the sales bullshit, I found a practice built on straightforward concepts not only amusingly true about human nature, but actually useful for getting yourself and others into action too. I wanted to share the most useful concepts for you to use below:
You already have the solutions to your own problems.
This is the fundamental concept of coaching; at the end of the day you not only know what you want but have the tools and ideas to get there. All you need is to be pushed to think of them, and to then be held accountable to actioning them. What’s immensely appealing about this is the fact that coaching encourages sustainability of reaching your own goals — and obviously if a solution isn’t sustainable then it either creates some kind of dependency, or fizzles out pretty quickly.
Want answers? Ask questions.
Coaching uses the simplest tactic ever to get you to cut through your own bullshit, hidden ideas and decisions you were afraid to make — questions. Questions prompt you to really set aside that moment to think for yourself, and even as straightforward as it sounds, the results were astounding from fellow course participants. People who started a 10 minute coaching session not having a clue, finished up with goals and actionable plans they had come up with all themselves. And they felt great about it, because no-one just lazily threw them some advice on a silver platter.
And the best question to ask someone if they’re at a dead end of what to do? ‘What advice would you give to a friend in the same situation?’. Works every time.
We bullshit each other, but mainly ourselves.
If we honestly thought about it, the reason we don’t have a lot of the things we realistically want is often ourselves. Either we are excusing our bad behaviour or lack of action, or we’ve allowed ourselves to have limiting beliefs which then make us think we can’t be X because we can’t do Y, or don’t deserve to have something. Sometimes there are deep underlying reasons for people feeling these ways, but sometimes there’s really not and it’s just classic human bullshitting. Coaching challenges these bullshit excuses and limiting assumptions — but constructively so you learn to be freed from them dragging you down, rather than reprimandingly.
Things aren’t actually as overwhelming as they feel.
A lot of the time our failure to tackle some of our truest goals in life, or biggest problems, is because of how utterly overwhelming they can feel. The work can stack up whilst we plug the time with other things to feel successful, and decisions can be avoided because there’s just so many things to choose from and factors to consider, how can we possibly know what we want? Coaching works through this overwhelming anxiety by helping us to break things down into practical and motivating steps for ourselves, so vague dreams are transformed into chunks we are happy to think we can carry out.
