Do you feel stuck or unsure about how to reach your full potential? Well, goals set by a life coach can help.
Goals set by life coaching is an empowering process meant to first identify and then achieve any goals in personal life and professional career. A life coach helps relationships for advancements, while support and guidance are also always available from life coaches to help clients achieve success.
If you are confused about where you want to traverse your life path, then keep on reading ahead to get some answers!
Achieve Goals & Live Your Best Life with Help from a Life Coach
Let’s first begin from what a life coach is. A certified life coach is a professional who is meant to help people achieve success in their life. A life coach, therefore can be called a wellness coach as well because they make sure you are feeling fulfilled from your professional as well as persona life.
Once you contact a life coach, they will vigorously review and plan your life, and then look for ways for you to attain personal growth. A life coach can have huge positive effects on your self-esteem, while business coaching can improve your self-esteem through career goals and progress.
This is why, to live your best life and achieve the heights of success that you feel you have failed to do so till now, contact a life coach and get planning.
What Is Goal Setting?
A very important part of planning success with a life coach is to set goals. In simple terms, goal setting is to create an action plan that drives you to achieve improvement in your skills, gain confidence and improve relationships.
Goal setting has to be extremely personalised to your needs, wants and desires. Say, for example, you have seen your classmates wanting to make steady progress on their grades by group sessions for learning. However, if this not your style of learning and prefer studying alone, then making steady progress on grades cannot be achieved by following what they are doing. You have to realize that you have your own life path and to move forward you have to develop highly personalised life goals.
The Significance of Your Goal
In life coaching or otherwise, your goals hold significant importance in determining how your life trajectory progresses. Our personal lives can be under stress, but if pertinent goals are set then mental stability and wellness can be achieved.
This is why, when doing goal setting, make sure you are addressing the important issues. A few creative and motivating coaching goals are:
- Build confidence
- Work on active listening
- Improve relationships
- Manage stress
- Find a work-life balance
All these goals can be significant, if you want to achieve wellness and stable mental health, while at the same time they are realistic goals, ensuring success.
What are the Goals and Objectives of a Life Coach?
Now that you know what goal setting is and what of goals to set for success, let’s delve deeper into goals for a life coach. A life coach can be a business coach, right life coach, career coach or help you live your best life, overcome limiting beliefs, gain self-awareness etc.
Depending on your needs, a life coach can change your goals and action plan, such that you are able to achieve the end result swiftly and without any stress.
However, that being said, there are various types of life coaches with areas of expertise. For instance:
- Addiction coaching
- Business coaching
- Dating coaching
- Diet, fitness or health coaching
- Wellness coaching
- Career coaching
- Spirituality coaching
In each area of expertise, the life coach will provide you with specific and life changing advise, support and resources to improve your life and wellbeing.
How Does Life Coaching Work? What are the Three Key Goals of Coaching?
To understand how a life coach is able to achieve what you yourself can’t, can be explained through research. In scientific studies, a coach, mentor, supervisor or manager, whatever you call it, has been shown to improve motivation to achieve individual goals. The way it is done is through effective leadership, which envisions change and helps a person reach their full potential.
So, a life coach can act as a confidant, a mentor and even a friend to get you through the hard parts, and finally achieve those changes that can improve your life. However, a life coach always has three goals in mind, when they work with you, they are:
- Take Immediate and Consistent Action
A life coach will never delay actions and results. They will ask you to make a plan, write down to do lists and remember key things. This will help you overcome a lack of structure in your life and align long term goals in your everyday life. With consistency, you will be focused on achieving short term goals and before you know, you will finally be able to achieve your dreams
A coach will help you understand your own self through self-awareness exercises. This will make you realise if your goal is actually something you want to achieve or is it an outcome of stress and social pressure.
Your career, relationships and personal life are all bound to be impacted by society and culture, so a life goal will help you realize what you want to achieve from your goals.
- Discover Clarity and Direction
Feeling stuck and confused over what to do in this long life is pretty common, if you ask me. Life coaches fulfil the important role of giving you direction.
For example, you have gained admission in the Bachelor’s program of a certain subject, but you do not know if you like the subject or not. Coaching goals will help you with this kind of thing, by making it clear what you want, what you need and what is an outcome of stress and social pressure
What Does a Client Learn from a Life Coach?
Based on the three key goals of a life coach, you are bound to learn a few things in your sessions with them. You learn three things from a life coach; Empowerment, Improvement and Guidance.
Beginning with empowerment, a life coach will help you gain confidence in your dreams and your abilities. Then a life coach will make an action plan, turning your dreams into specific goals and realistic steps that can be taken to achieve. Finally, you will learn from a life coach about what direction you must take with your life.
However, your learnings from a life coach are inherently dependent upon the kind of coaching you get
- Career Coaching Goals
If you are looking for a life coach to gain direction in your career, then your learnings will lead to increase in self-awareness. You will be exploring your own self and learning your own likes and dislikes, as well as what you expect out of life and career.
- Business Coaching
However, if you seek a life coach for your business, then you will learn a very different thing. This kind of life coaching will help you with improving your self-esteem and gaining self-confidence to overcome personal hurdles in setting up and running a business
A business coach will also give you objective advice on supply chain management, operational management, marketing, HR and other important aspect that most businesses have.
How Life Coaching Helps in Business
If you are confused in regards to your business and stuck if you should opt for a life coach or not, then this might help.
Business coaching is mainly for business owners looking to improve their productivity and gain success in their business ventures. A life coach will help you to better manage your teams within the organisation, any marketing activities, conduct market research etc. to improve operations and gain success.
When starting a business, it is inevitable that you lack the expertise and knowledge on how to run it. In this regards, a coach will set goals to build on strengths of a business, overcome its weaknesses, plan towards opportunities and avoid threats to the business model.
So, if you are an entrepreneur lacking knowledge, new ideas or confidence in managing your company, then contact a life coach.
How Life Coaching Helps in Personal Life
Contrary to a business coach, a life coach meant for personal life works very differently. A life coach can help you stay focused on your goals and discover own needs that help you achieve the impossible.
However, not all personal life coaching is ambitious, it can be based on your personality type and work to improve mental health and relationships. If you are fighting a lot with your boyfriend or husband, then a life coach can help you two work out any misunderstandings.
The progress of a life coach in personal life is determined by your satisfaction and happiness in meeting own needs, overcoming stress and being the person you’ve always wanted to be.
Who Can Benefit from Life Coaching?
Now that we know all about life coaching, we can proceed towards clients of life coaches. There is absolutely no limit on who can and cannot access life coaches. As discussed on the types of life coaches, there are as many types to as many problems you might face.
It can be related to your career, personal life, business or sports. If you want help, advice or a direction, you can be sure to find a life coach to help you to achieve goals. So, if you are a student, worker, entrepreneur or a working professional, you can benefit from a life coach.
Even if you don’t have any professional recognition, but feel stressed from life, relationships or friends, then executive coaching goals can help you achieve success.
How to Set Goals? How Goal-Setting Helps You Reach Your Goals?
Once you have accessed a life coach, the next step is to set achievable and measurable goals for yourself that meet your own needs. To do so, you can follow the steps of identifying your wants, needs and desires, followed by converting your dreams into measurable goals.
Once you have done so, you can review your goals on the basis of following themes:
- Overcome Self-Limiting Beliefs
You cannot let your low self-esteem or low self-confidence affect your thinking in setting goals. The purpose of a goal is to be far reaching and dreams are meant to envision the impossible, so overcome any self-limiting beliefs and keep reminding yourself that you can do it!
- Identify Goals and Create a Success Plan with Clarity and Direction
The process of identifying goals can be a tricky one. This is where life coaches can help you generate new ideas and find meaningful purpose for your life.
When setting goals, be mindful that your goals have clarity and direction, rather than being ambiguous and furthering your confusion. So, instead of saying I want to go to Egypt, set a goal to save 10% every month to be able to afford a trip to Egypt.
- Remember, Difficulties Are Not Difficulties, They Are Challenges
When setting goals, especially goals that concern your persona life, it can be daunting to manage stress and find solutions at the same time. As a result, we end up giving up in front of difficulties, in hopes that a knight in shining armour will come and solve them for us
But a reminder, there are not knights in shining armours. Whatever solution is available can only be achieved by doing it your own self and succeeding even when surrounded by certain circumstances.
- Make Sure Goals Do Not Conflict With One Another
Your action plan is a straight forward path to goal achievement, therefore if you conflicting goals, this path can be reversed, intertwined and hurdled. So, keep your goals well differed from one another.
An example of a conflicting goal is to gain financial independence and at the same time looking to buy a thousand dollar handbag. Both goals may bring you happiness, but you cannot gain financial independence from doing savings, if you are spending on designer handbags.
- List of Actions to Achieve Sub-Goal
For achieving goals, it is imperative that you break it down into achievable milestone or sub-goals.
To clarify, the example of improving your goals can be given. You have the larger goal, but your sub-goals will make it achievable and turn into measurable goals. You can set sub-goals of reading more, doing your homework, active listening in the classroom, studying with classmates, solving problems etc. These sub-goals are the template on which you will reach your long term goal.
How to Write a Personal Mission Statement
Talking about coaching goals, an inherent and important part of setting goals and achieving goals is to come up with creative and compelling mission statement. The purpose of a mission statement is to make your goals clear to you.
- Write It All Down
To begin writing a personal statement, you have to start by jotting down all your ideas, thoughts and expectations from the future. Once you have done brainstorming, then you proceed to finding a personal and measurable goal
- Think About and Identify Past Successes
To find motivation, think about your past successes. Your life coach probably has dealt in this way with many clients, by asking them to reflect on their strengths and past glories, in order to remind them that whatever lies ahead can be achievable.
- Identify Contributions That You Could Make
To achieve your goals, you have to identify changes that need to be made. These changes can be seen as your contribution to achieving what you want. The contribution can be a change in habit, overcoming anxious thoughts or making savings.
- Formulate your Mission Statement
Such people that look to achieve goals do so by establishing personalised mission statements. The last step in this is to review your brainstorming sessions, ideas, advice and then formulate a mission statement.
To make it easier for you, here are a few examples of personal mission statements:
- I want to strive to be present and available to my kids
- I want to become the best athlete in basketball in my school
- I wish to work on my relationships and make my family/friends happy
How to Write an Action Plan
After writing down your mission statement, the next step is to turn them into actionable steps to get to your desired goal. To write an action:
- Step 1: What is the end goal?
You have to begin with a clear, concise, relevant and encouraging goal for you
- Step 2: How do you reach your end goal?
Once you have a goal in mind, then think of ways that goal can be achieved. Is it by saving more? Or by developing a habit? A life coaching goal can help you get started in this step
- Step 3: Set milestones
You have a goal and steps needed to achieve them. Now, start aligning your sub-goals in a well-structured manner, so that you are only working on one sub-goal or milestone at one time to avoid confusion and maintain productivity.
- Step 4: Progress Report
To hold yourself accountable in reaching your desired goal, make a progress report at weekly or monthly intervals. You can ask a life coach to audit your progress or do it yourself
- Step 5: Evaluate the outcome
Once you are at the other end, now you evaluate your journey. Think of what you did right, what went wrong and what could be improved if you were to repeat the whole thing again.
Five Impacts on Performance
- Lower Procrastination
In a study conducted on role of coaches on goal attainment, it was found that participants showed less procrastination, when a life coach was present. Therefore, to keep yourself on track to achieve your goals, get a life coach
- Holding Yourself Accountable
This also involves the role of a life coach to act as an authority in reaching your goals. When you have a life coach, slacking on short term tasks will be avoided because there will be someone to hold you accountable
- Self-Esteem
A life coach can improve your self-esteem. The way this works is that, when you work alone on your goals, your negative thoughts and self-limiting beliefs can engulf you, but a life coach will help you navigate your emotions better
- Empowerment
Goals set by a life coach can be empowering because a life coach will force you to look at your strengths and focus on them to achieve your goals
- Wellbeing
It is a proven fact by a Frontier’s study that coaches and mentors help in improving mental health and wellbeing when working towards a goal. This is due to relationship building and a trusting relationship you create with your life coaches.
To conclude this article, my advice to you would be to try out the services of a life coach and help them set you some coaching goals. The experience will only help you learn more about yourself, your wants and expectations from life. If anything, it might even help you improve your relationship with yourself. So give it a try!