How You Can Leverage Life Coaching Skills to Improve Yourself & Those Around You

When you think of a life coach, you might think of someone who follows other people around and tells them what to do in each sticky situation they find themselves in.

At one point, this actually was how the industry worked. Most life coaches acted more like football coordinators than psychiatrists.

Life coaching today takes a much different approach. For one thing, it lacks much of the in-your-face posturing that once defined the industry.

More importantly, though, it focuses on developing skills that anyone can use to improve themselves and help foster healthy relationships with other people around them.

Developing Basic Life Coaching Skills

Previously, people who wanted to become life coaches had to attend special classes and get at least some kind of diploma in most instances.

While there’s never been any government authorities that demanded this sort of thing, many employers did for the longest time.

Today, interested parties can study to earn an online life coach certification from the comfort of their own homes. This makes it easy enough for anyone to do it, which is why so many people are opting to develop these skills to solve problems in their own lives.

Social media resources have technically brought people together like never before, but it’s also made it easier for people to feel left out. Many rabid consumers of technology are starting to feel as though they don’t have actual interpersonal connections because of the behaviors they see online.

Eventually, these problems can leak out of cyberspace into a person’s real life. Some commentators have begun to refer to the fear of missing out on things talked about on social media as a legitimate psychological problem.

Others have written at length about how people are quickly becoming conditioned to accept opinions before considering all of the facts. Some individuals increasingly suffer from information overload as they desperately try to consume everything that’s posted on newsfeeds or discussed by top personalities.

In all of these cases, the same skills taught in a life coaching program can help people to reframe their thoughts and eliminate disordered feelings.

Refocusing the Way People View Situations

In either of these cases, people can rethink how they’re looking at a certain situation. While someone might feel that they’re lonely because their posts lack a certain number of views, this kind of thinking quickly passes when they realize that online followers don’t necessarily turn into real friends.

Even though these might seem like minor problems, a recent study linked cellular phone use with genuine obsessions. Others have elected to focus life coaching skills on overcoming more serious addictions.

Substance abuse problems often require at least some form of medical intervention, but life coaching skills can help people overcome the underlying causes of them. Loneliness, dissatisfaction, and depression often cause people to turn to illicit substances in order to handle strong emotions.

College students, in particular, are at risk of developing these problems. This is in part due to the amount of stress they’re put under by both the educational system and their peer groups. Refocusing thoughts through a little self-coaching can help to drastically reduce this risk.

Using Life Coaching Skills to Help Others

Life coaches are often focused on interpersonal communication, which is important for anyone trying to develop a relationship with someone else. As you reframe your lines of communication, you might find that you can help others work out problems for themselves.

Perhaps the most important piece of advice about providing this service to others is to let them talk out their issues. Those who ask for a chance to talk to someone without being judged usually genuinely want just that. Don’t feel like you need to speak more than listen.

Noted psychologist Carl Ransom Rogers proposed back in the 1950s that people can work out their own problems when they’re given an opportunity to do so by talking to other people. This is the basis of modern neuro-linguistic programming systems. Person-centered therapy is something that many people pay quite a bit of money for.

By learning a few basic life coaching skills, you’ll be able to provide it for free and make a number of very real friends along the way.