what is life coaching?
love your life coaching
Certified Life and Relationship Coaching in Los Angeles
life coaching is life changing
Life coaching is an emerging talk therapy designed to help people achieve what they want from life. Life coaches partner with their clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires the client to maximize their personal and professional potential.
The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity, and leadership. Life coaches support clients in clarifying goals, overcoming challenges, and unlocking potential in any area of life.
This can include career changes, relationships, confidence, mindset, finances, life purpose, anything! Life coaches help clients gain clarity, break through limiting beliefs, and create strategies to achieve meaningful success and fulfillment.
Professionally trained coaches have the tools and knowledge to ask the right questions—like a detective—to draw out from yourself what is the true solution to your problems may be.
In a way a life coach is like your subconscious reflecting back (your own) answers to you. Done properly, everything you take away from one of our sessions will be perfectly aligned with your true self, and you’ll leave with a clear path forward, or at the very least, the next best step for you to take.
And the best thing is, it’s all coming from you. Think of a life coach as a mirror, reflecting back to you what’s really inside.
life coaching is not therapy
While there is some degree of overlap between the two, the main difference between life coaching and counseling is that licensed therapists tend to focus more on your life experiences, traumas, and pain. It’s designed to help the client understand, integrate, and heal these wounds left on our psyche.
Life coaching works best if it comes during or after that process, when the client, now armed with a degree of self-awareness, is ready to move from simply surviving to thriving in their life. After healing comes growth. It’s very hard to grow while actively healing or still carrying unresolved wounds.
In general, therapy is focused on the past, whereas life coaching is about moving forward into the future.
If therapy is preparing the soil and planting the seed, then coaching is watering it and cultivating its growth. You can see how simply leaving things at therapy tends to result in few tangible results without practical action. It’s the difference between head and heart knowledge, and bridging the gap to bring that understanding into real, physical changes.
who life coaching is for
You’re a good candidate for coaching if you have done the preliminary groundwork of deeper introspection and healing from your past traumas and ACEs (adverse childhood experiences, which pretty much everyone has).
Coaching would be a great fit for you if you’ve been “doing all the things” to grow past survival mode, such as journaling, shadow work, meditation, counseling, etc., but you’re finding those things only seem to take you so far on your path towards wholeness and joy.
Perhaps you feel you’ve been hitting a glass ceiling in terms of fully healing, and it’s starting to be noticeable—even holding you back from creating a life that you love.
Maybe you thought you had it all figured out, and had grown past certain things, only to be unexpectedly triggered again and you wonder if you’ll ever feel consistently regulated.
It can be very frustrating to do so much inner work and still not feel better on a day-to-day basis.
Keep in mind, coaching is only effective in so far as how willing the client is to put the effort in; I’ve turned clients away because they decided to not do their “homework” (our agreed upon action steps). A big part of coaching is accountability.
Coaching would not be a good fit if you’re just looking for someone to hold your hand and listen to your struggles, while you simultaneously refuse to do anything about it.
At Love Your Life Coaching, I’m looking for clients who are self-aware, naturally curious, transparent, intellectually honest, and above all, are committed to their own betterment.
Additionally, taking a sense of ownership and responsibility for your life is essential to beginning a truly transformative life coaching journey. While you had no control over your upbringing or trauma, is your responsibility what you choose to do with it after the fact.
what to expect
During our first session (the intake), we begin with some basic information, like walking me through your current life situation, your past experiences, as well as what you’re unsatisfied with and what you wish were different about your life.
The more information I can get, the more complete the picture I’ll have of your situation and the more effectively I can coach to the problems you’re facing.
You’ll then be asked a series of questions so that I can dig deeper into your focus area for our time; each session usually has a stated end goal for what you, the client, would like to achieve during our time.
Unlike many coaches, I seek to ferret out the root cause of what ails you, in order to provide more permanent results. Yes, we can absolutely come up with a list of “Ten Ways to Improve Motivation” for example, but what I’m more interested in is finding out the why and what is actually causing your lack of motivation.
I’ll never understand coaching that relies on surface level life hacks, because the client will always have the same issues pop up, just in different ways.
It’s like having a toilet that stopped flushing. Instead of calling a plumber and getting it properly fixed, I know a few coaches’ approach would be the equivalent of; “Just don’t flush the toilet.” Or: “use less toilet paper.” Or: “use your neighbor’s toilet.” Or even “don’t go to the bathroom as often.”
Problem avoided solved! Except, sooner or later, you’ll inevitably have shit overflowing everywhere.
It reminds me of many of the people on TLC’s My 600lb Life. They get the bariatric surgery, but continue to overeat and they inevitably regain. These people did the external physical thing, but there must be something deep inside that is empty or painful that they’re trying to numb, or else they’d be able to sustain results.
Whereas those who continue to progress have done the inner work combined with pragmatic decisions. That’s what I’m interested in achieving with my clients, because that’s what leads to a life truly transformed. It has to be both the internal and external work for any change to be permanent.
Like most things, it’s easier to slap a band-aid on it (cover up the symptoms), but it’s always better to find the real cause, address that, provide a few practical steps, and the problem will naturally improve over time.
when you will see results
You most likely will leave the very first session feeling immensely better about your concerns; you’ll discover a newfound sense of hope and optimism that you can make positive differences in your (once seemingly hopeless) situation. We usually have some type of action step or next thing to do or try (homework), as well as a plan of action towards reaching your long-term goals.
Sometimes a client just needs to talk and receive validation on what they’re feeling or experiencing, sometimes they need specific advice or words of wisdom that are relevant to what they’re going through.
Above all, Love Your Life’s clients always leave with something positive right away, and over time, step by step, they start making the necessary adjustments and reap the benefits of their coaching work.
Results can be seen as early as a session or two, but it’s not uncommon for clients to seek continuous support spanning months or even years.
Some clients receive coaching for a few months, reach improvement in their desired focus areas, and discontinue coaching for a time but then start back up again months later as new life challenges crop up.
Just like nature, our lives reflect different seasons. The amount of time it will take to “see results” for your specific needs vary depending on the variables, your own level of self-actualization, and how proactive you are as a client.
Given that, in general most clients achieve what they’re looking for from a commitment of at least several months with consistent weekly sessions.
how Love Your Life Coaching is different
Everything Love Your Life Coaching does is through the lens of increasing the world’s consciousness, and you are a part of the world. I was gifted with a high level of intuitional understanding, and am able to see through situations for what they really are, as well as understand what deeper dynamics are at play.
All of this is done with the goal of supporting you in your quest for a more happy, balanced life.
Additionally, I meet clients where they’re at in a trauma-informed way. What this means is that a client’s past trauma and life experiences are always kept top of mind during our session.
We are not who we are in a vacuum, everything is connected to everything else. What works for you won’t work for another, and a part of that is considering past pain.
Los Angeles, CA 90004