(683 words – 4.5 minutes read)

Human growth is about enhancing our consciousness and gaining more analytical skills – by accessing to our newer parts of the brain – to understand reality with more clarity to actualize more and more of our potential.

When it comes to self-growth, there is no lack of quality resources these days. Many institutes are providing a variety of paths that help tremendously to find one’s unique journey of self-development. But how can a coach help you in this path?

We humans have the ability to create a story for every life event based on our perceptions. To know how comprehensive our stories are, we share them with others. Others can reflect to us, to see what we have not seen in our stories and how fragmented they are from the whole reality. This is where a life coach can help as a confidant and mirror to us by listening to our stories and helping us expand our perspective on our story. Working with a coach allows us to open our hearts in a safe environment. The coach listens and offers techniques and practices that help us see life with a broader view with multi-dimensional characters in our story acting influenced by the dynamic of the environment. The life coach helps us see ourselves in the big picture of life and how we play our roles in each story.

Telling our story changes the brain chemistry toward more connection and puts a structure on our story. The coach who is attentively and compassionately listening to us will offer the practices that can help us to gradually know ourselves better and change the habits that no longer serve us. A life coach is a partner, a team member, who helps us to set the ship sail and to continue our journey to a flourishing life. A life coach can stay with us until we have enough self-awareness and self-acceptance to enable us to ground ourselves during good and bad weather and lead our ship safely and with resiliency.

In a coaching session, we look at each story from different points of view and will answer questions such as: who am I at this moment of my life? Who are others to me? How am I living now? What are the triggers that unsettle me emotionally and change my mood? What tools am I applying to live my life? Who do we want to become and how do we want to live our life from now on? Then we try to find answers to those questions to build a new “me”.

A coach helps us evaluate the skills we have developed through our cognitive, emotional, and somatic intelligences and helps us create opportunities to deepen our abilities for a healthier lifestyle. The coach supports us recognize our kneejerk reactions to our hot buttons and learn more about connecting to our analytical states which will empowers us to understand how to calm our nerve system. We learn how to recognize different mixes of emotions by their sensations in our body and how to regulate them, advancing our analytical skills.

I don’t think it is an exaggeration if I say that many of us think self-criticizing thoughts motivate us to make progress in our lives. That is a myth and in contrast, new scientific research studies along with traditional wisdom show self-compassion practices are an efficient vehicle of self-growth. Self-criticism comes from our old habits and beliefs.

In order to develop new skills to make the transformation, the life coach investigates our habits and beliefs, and will help us update the ones that no longer serve us. I believe that self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-compassion are the foundations of this work. Until we know what is blocking our energy, and we learn how to accept ourselves with kindness, it will be difficult to accept others truly and authentically and collaborate in life events. A life coach’s primary job is to hold space for us, helping us to accept ourselves for who we are with kindness and to begin the changes that optimize our skills to connect more deeply to life.

Let’s celebrate life!

Editing credit: Mike Curtis

Photo from Pixabay.com