What is a Personal Life Coach? Why You Might Need One

There are a variety of reasons people look for a personal life coach. It can be to help them through hardship, reach a goal, or change something in their life. Consider whether a personal life coach can help you grow and reach your goals.

One example of someone looking for a personal life coach may involve finances. Maybe you are tracking your discretionary spending each month and noticing patterns that are not producing the outcomes you want. While you can identify the problem, you’re having trouble with the solution.

Maybe it’s something different. Maybe you and your spouse continue to circle around discussions about household responsibilities. The ones you’re least interested in doing are the ones he needs your help to complete: paying bills on time, managing the children’s discretionary funds, paying for their extracurricular activities, and grocery shopping.

Would a personal life coach help?

You could try a financial planner, but this emphasizes financial-only goals. As you’ve examined your spending patterns and discussed the budgetary needs with your husband, you’re in agreement (for the most part) about how money is allocated. So, is a financial planner going to help you achieve your goals, not just by ensuring your money is spent according to your budget, but also by resolving disagreements?

What about dividing responsibilities? Is this something you can work out on your own, or is it causing more tension in the household?

Enter the personal life coach. While life coaching has received some flak in recent years, evidence-based coaching is helpful. It can draw on the studies about coaching from four fields: behavioral sciences, business and economics, philosophy, and workplace learning or development.

What is a personal life coach?

At its simplest, a personal life coach is someone who helps others find solutions for growth in some area of their lives. From a psychological standpoint, therapists bring their expertise in behavioral science to the coaching client, even though the emphasis differs.

With therapy, you may be looking for help to explore how your family of origin impacts your relational health, how to overcome a traumatic event, or how to deal with grief, for example. There are multiple reasons to visit a licensed therapist, but these are a few examples.

In a coaching session, you’re more likely to see a personal life coach for results-driven future achievements. You’ll also be focused on your present-day experience as opposed to how your life story impacts your goals.

In the previous example, you might be looking for help to overcome the present-day challenge of talking about money more positively with your spouse. That’s a short-term goal. You can move directly from where you are today to a new goal, one that your personal life coach helps you set.

Coaching sessions are generally more strategic, short-term, and collaborative than therapy sessions. They also focus on a small, achievable problem or goal you’d like to reach in the future. A coach will help you set mini goals and possibly explore the lens you use today to see the impact of budget and relational health, so that you can achieve your goal in the next couple of months: discussing financial conversations with a positive mindset.

What should I look for in a coach?

Coaching runs the gamut from wellness and lifestyle to business and leadership coaching. It’s important to seek a coach who has experience working with clients who have had the same issue or growth area as you. Just as you wouldn’t hire a personal trainer who didn’t have experience working with runners if you’re an avid runner, you shouldn’t hire a coach in wellness if your goal is more about relational health.

To examine if a personal life coach is going to help you or not, look at their client history, read testimonials (especially reviews that are on other sites, not their own), and ask if they’re a member of a voluntary certification organization.

Organizations such as the International Association of Board Certified Psychology Coaches or the National Academy of Coaching Psychology are not governing organizations. Still, a certified coach in a mental health practice will likely belong to one of them.

Other questions to ask a potential personal life coach include:

• Are you a strengths-based clinician using evidence-based coaching practices? (If yes, you can follow up with one of the next few questions.)
• What methodology is your coaching based on?
• What strategies do you use for motivational tools?
• What are some of the phases of change that you help your clients move through, and how do you do that?
• What feedback do you need from a client to help them?

Caution Ahead: When Not to Hire a Personal Life Coach

If you are not clear about what you need, we recommend speaking with a licensed therapist first. Even if you just complete an intake session with a therapist, you’ll discover whether you are in the right place or not. They may ask questions about why you’re there, what it is you’re struggling with, or how they can help.

While these questions seem simple enough, explaining to a professional about the kind of help you want can be more telling than simply thinking about it. Here’s why.

When you verbalize your struggles or challenges or you talk about where you want to grow, it forces you to clarify what you want and what you don’t want. This can help your therapist understand if you’ll need psychological therapy to address the issues you’re interested in or if a personal life coach would better suit your needs.

Many people hire life coaches when they are stuck or not seeing the progress they want. But the primary difference between a coach and a therapist is that the former will approach your challenge from a strengths-based, motivational perspective. They’ll help you explore what motivates you to change instead of sitting in the expert chair to tell you how to change.

A therapist is going to dive deeper into your family of origin, relational background, and your past to help you adopt growth patterns. Both will use evidence-based practices built on scientific research (especially if your coach is also a certified licensed therapist), but the kind of work you do will be different.

One is like a swim instructor teaching you the breaststroke, and the other is like a swim instructor asking you questions about your swimming experiences in the past and how they’ve shaped your swimming abilities and feelings about swimming.

One collaborates with you to help you recognize and realize short-term gains, and the other looks at your challenges and explores a holistic healing perspective that may help you shift over time. Counseling is not geared to short-term goal-setting, and it’s more inquisitive about your past.

A therapist is best if you are in an abusive relationship, have nightmares or flashbacks, struggle to complete everyday tasks, or find yourself thinking negatively about yourself and those around you more than you’d like. A therapist can give you tools and help you explore where your past intersects with your current struggle.

On the other hand, if your present-day experience is something where you just need a little boost to cross the proverbial finish line on a goal or a relationship, it’s more likely that a personal life coach is best.

One woman who saw a personal life coach recognized that although she had a history of conflict around money with her family, she didn’t really need to dive into it to expand her growth area. Instead, she just needed help setting small financial goals to equip her to reach a larger goal in a couple of months.

How does mental health impact a personal life coach’s method?

Seeking a personal life coach from a licensed therapy practice is going to give you some assurance that you’re working with a professional who understands how the brain works. Coaches who are also trained mental health clinicians have experience with emotional blocks, trauma therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and other evidence-based psychological tools.

They also know that a coaching session can stay fixed on the present and look toward future gains. They’ll recognize when a conversation starts slipping into previous history and know how to help you stay present, positive, and find the motivation that works for you.

Instead of seeing them as the master teacher providing a lesson, you can view them as a friend who just so happens to have a professional background in goal-setting and motivational methods. If you’d like to find a personal life coach to help you, our therapy practices have therapists trained to do just that. Reach out today so we can match you with someone in your area.