Skip to main content

What's the story with Life Coaching?

Sounds like the introduction to 'Seinfeld" skit!.

Life Coaching: When did it become fashionable to acquire a life coach? There seems to have been a dramatic shift from the psycho-therapist's couch to the On-Line Life-Coach/Personal Planner in recent times.
Are we becoming less sane? Or are we becoming more self aware and sophisticated in our personal development?

In a mere few generations, society has moved from agrarian to urban. Family and village values that tied communities together became diluted as the pace of change increased and peer groups became less cohesive.

Back in the day, the Sunday pulpit served as a voice of reason and consolidation of values and meaning. The erosion of simple life philosophies through education bred cynicism, and questioning of ones place in the natural order. The problem with self awareness is that increasing introspection can leave a void. A sense of fuzziness as to our life's purpose.

This 'helter skelter' rushing around chasing work, home, social, education, health, sport and spiritual pursuits, in the hope of achieving a successful balance of sanity, happiness and meaning no longer seems so simple. Divorce rates have never been higher. Kids today are reared by biological and step parent/s. Their siblings are biological and step-'half-brothers and sisters'. Families relocate frequently. This dislocation can impact our our innate sense of balance and social calibration.

How do we define ourselves? Are we mothers, teachers, entrepreneurs, friends, or confidants?

This awareness that Life's no longer simple and predictable is producing generations of stressed out confused and uneasy individuals, assessing their life balance ratios.

What is life Coaching? Generally accepted as unregulated and non accredited, the Life Coach is often a mentor within the same social circle. Often a calm voice of non judgmental reason and sounding board. A motivator and listener. The main difference between a Life coach and certified therapist is that a therapist focuses on diagnosing the past. The LC however focuses on facilitating change in present and future behavior.

The main goal of most LC's is the inspiring of a more positive future vision. Identifying and inspiring goals. The two most important roles of the LC however is eliciting a conscious balancing of life goals to produce the highest degree of happiness, and uncovering the highest life goal, which is that of Life Purpose. There is very little in life that is more profound than the search for meaning. Life purpose may be defined as that which we would be willing to die for. Ironically, this life purpose can get lost in the head long rush toward insignificant accoutrement, and once lost, leave an empty feeling of pointlessness bereft of joy.

So what's your life purpose? A tad uncomfortable question to answer perhaps, but worth the effort maybe!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Maybe You Should Just Quit!

Not a slogan Nike would advocate! Without some context words such as persistence, patience, endeavor and dedication suggest a noble attitude to life matters. They symbolize ‘the stiff upper lip’ attitude to struggle. "Never ever give up"; to paraphrase Churchill goes to the heart of most self-help and personal development philosophy. The danger of blindly following this type of perseverance without considering its context is that more often than not, triumph does not overcome adversity, at the first attempt. There is a massive industry peddling personal development material. Books, Seminars, Webinars and all manner of strategies that range from useful and inspiring to borderline extortion. Harsh comment? I don’t think so. We live in a society that reveres its celebrities regardless of their substance. The personal development industry has its share of super rich ‘leaders’ who have attained a status within their tribe equivalent to religious pontiffs. Some of thes...

How's Your Obsesion Working For You?

What a boring bland world this would be in the absence of mass irrational obssessiveness. There would be NO wonders of the world. Forget about the Guinness Book of Records or in fact any significant historical achievement. Why would anyone in their right mind set sail in a barely sea worthy vessel in the direction of the horizon with no reasonable expectation of navigating anywhere but over the edge of the world? We could argue that the Pyramids and ancient Aztec monuments were a response not to obsession but rather to a spiritual impulse. The appeasing of the gods as it were. Let’s not however meander in to that quicksand of philosophy. It would be all too easy to polarize most readers of this brief scribble by even hinting that Religion is an obsession. It’s hard not to be fascinated by the apparent crazy impulsive behavior of many collectors. I’m not referring to those with an eye on turning over a dollar, but rather those whose lives seemed consumed in a never endin...

Why Isn't The Law of Attraction Working for You?

This is a confronting and provocative question. It presumes there’s a gap in your life and that you are in some way failing, falling short of your own expectations. If The Law of Attraction does indeed work, how then do we explain how bad things happen to good people? How can we explain how the worst of criminals can win the Lottery? Indeed we can question whether this much-quoted Law is in fact a myth. The point of this article is not to ponder the riddle of this apparent phenomenon or get bogged down in the mire of attempting to define the intangible. Rather I would like to posit the following commentary. Let’s twist the above question. Imagine that despite your initial reaction to the topic, that you are indeed living the dream, but have failed to realize this fact. Perhaps your appreciation lens is clouded.  Perhaps you are with your ideal life partner but are blinded to this fact by virtue of your incessant fantasizing of some parallel universe where ...