What is Positive Psychology Coaching and How to Use it in Your Practice?

What is positive psychology coaching and how can you incorporate it into your practice? Though the term is sometimes dismissed as unscientific happy talk, it can possess an important place in your coaching toolbox and help clients reach a better understanding of their lives, their needs, and their desires.

Positive psychology is a broad term, encompassing many different techniques and styles that encourage and motivate people to identify, develop, and nurture their positive attitudes, emotions, talents, experiences, and character traits.

Any type of coach, no matter their area of expertise, can think about the question, “What is positive psychology coaching?” Whether you are a life coach, a wellness coach, an executive coach, or some more specific niche within the coaching industry, it will benefit your practice to answer the question, “What is positive psychology coaching?”

What is Positive Psychology Coaching and How to Use it in Your Practice?

Though it is complex and dynamic, the question, the answer to this question can be summarized in one sentence: It is an emphasis on bringing out the best in individuals, groups, teams, and organizations, while creating positivity and creating lasting change. Remember it’s not therapy – the question isn’t – “What is positive psychological coaching? But, you do have to get in to your client’s head to pull out the happiness within.

Positive Psychology Coaching – 5 Tools for the Coach’s Toolbox

1. Identifying and developing new, positive activities that can bring about change. Discovering ways to repeat these activities to reinforce the new positivity.
2. Identifying a problem, renaming and relabeling it, and then refocusing it to have a more positive meaning. This is basically the art of redirecting an issue and turning a negative in to a positive.
3. Help the client establish rituals that promote a more optimistic and positive attitude. Not only should coaches and clients develop goals to achieve between coaching sessions, it also is beneficial for clients to work on nurturing positive rituals and routines.
4. Helping the client understand the difference between perfect and good enough. Asking clients to prioritize the aspects and tasks common to their lives by making a list helps them understand that there is a place in the lives for “good enough.” This can help reduce stress and actually free them up to be perfect in the areas of their lives that count the most.
5. Identifying and discovering the sweet spot of happiness. Helping clients find the sweet spot that causes the most pleasure and happiness, instead of focusing on overall happiness, will allow the to get to that place more often, and eventually brighten up their entire lives. Focusing on the specific instead of the general at times will actually bring about more general, overall happiness.

Do you have a better understanding of the question, “What is positive psychology coaching and how to use it in your practice?” There are hundreds of tools and exercises that can help clients find their true happiness in life, but you don’t have to be an expert on all of them to truly help your clients by incorporating some positive psychology coaching in to your practice. Just focus on the positive, find what makes them happy, and then help them identify and develop ways to get to that happiness sweet spot.

What is positive psychology coaching? It is all about the happiness within each and every client, and how your coaching skills can bring it out and make it shine!

By the way… you’re invited to claim your FREE step-by-step “30-Days to Become a Coach” video toolkit. Just go HERE  now to get your 30-day coaching blueprint videos.

Fred Philips
Business Coach
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