Life coaching is a caring profession. That is probably the most significant reason most coaches become coaches. You probably have spent much of your life acting as friend and confidante for the people you know. You want to help people. You want to make things easier and alleviate your clients’ pain. These are all noble aims of course. But guess what. While noble aims are wonderful and beautiful to have, the terrible truth about life coaching is that you have to be more than just a friend and confidante if you really want to make a difference in your clients’ lives.

Sometimes Life Coaching Means Tough Love

To really change lives, you need to be willing to do more than just listen and love your clients, and that may not be what you bargained for when you decided on life coaching as a career. Of course you care about your clients. Of course you listen with full attention. You do your best to “walk a mile in their shoes”, as the saying goes, so you can understand what’s going on in their head. But if that’s all you do, you are not serving them to the best of your abilities. What your clients need from you is a different view, a wider view. They need a perspective from outside their own head. And they need you to call them on their “stuff”.

Powerful Or Powerless?

Clients often come into life coaching because they feel powerless to change their life or business on their own. They always have a story, just like we all do. It’s tempting to just accept the story, to understand and commiserate, and sometimes that may be appropriate. But if that’s all you do, then you are reinforcing their powerlessness. You are colluding with them to blame circumstances or other people or bad luck for them not getting what they want in life. You are helping them to remain powerless instead of helping them take charge of their life and future.

The terrible truth about life coaching is that you can’t always be the sympathetic friend your clients think they are looking for, and you expected to be as a life coach. The biggest gift you can give your clients is to help them take back their power by seeing who they really are and acknowledging their responsibility for whatever happens in their lives.

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Dorine G Kramer
JTS Advisors Strategy and Accountability Coach