Becoming A Life Coach and Self Growth

When I was told that the first requirement for a life coach is continuing self  growth, I was totally sold on the idea of me becoming a life coach for the rest of my life. I consciously adopted the idea of self  growth about 30 years ago and since then have been in love with personal growth and spiritual growth (which I happen to think are the same thing).

Before that I was unconsciously searching for the idea. I joined a spiritual group; I went to a 24-hour encounter group with my ex-husband; I went to a 12-Step group to lose weight and I went to Marriage Encounter with my ex-husband. But I didn’t know what I was searching for and so it was hard to find. I had a spiritual awakening when I realized that I had to leave my marriage. I walked out on the ledge of uncertainty and ran away with no job and with four kids. That was my moment! And I learned from then on that what I was looking for was uncovering the Being I came here to earth to be.

I’ve had other addictions before - ones that made me high or fat - but this is a most positive one! I am addicted to uncovering my inner essence  and my  self  growth - and that is what I convey to my clients.

You University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

The Secret Need of Modern Women- An Insight for Living

An Insight for Living

Got anybody's attention yet? You know who you are. You love what you do. You can't wait to....coach, see therapy patients, work on your website, write in your blog, go on Facebook, create a new class, write a new e-book, etc.

You have working relationships with family, friends, partners, etc. You exercise several times a week and eat healthy. You have everything you ever wanted. So all your needs are satisfied, right?

• Then why do you feel a little bored?
• Why can't you quite find the juice to express gratitude in a feeling way for all that you have?
• Why do you feel a little resentful of your loving partner when he/she is around and hasn't done anything untoward?

The Secret:
YOU DON'T HAVE ANY ALONE TIME WHERE ALL YOU DO IS NURTURE YOURSELF. This is truly an insight for living.

No work. No giving - except to yourself. No supporting - except yourself. And, most important, no self-judgment about how much time you are wasting and could be doing something else because "I'm happy and lucky", right?

It's supposed to be an OLD story that women are only nurturers. Many fought for equal rights. Most of us observe that men watch sports or play sports or have a hobby with no guilt - just enjoyment. That is a man's insight for living. Well, that's one of our rights also.

What day are you going to take for yourself? Or, what hour? And what are you going to do that is just for you?

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Become a Better Life Coach Through Self Awareness

A  question  was  asked  in my  coaching  community.  It is a great  learning experience  for self awareness.   As  a coach  if I use self awareness  as a  tool  it can  create a great coaching  environment for my clients  and me.  The question asked:

I was on the phone with a friend and once again I found myself hearing her complain about her abusive job situation.  This has been going on for about 5 years.  She barely stops to take a breath, I once told her that unless there is progress being made, she is talking about the same thing over and over.

It makes me feel when someone does that, abused.

She has a steady job during a time when folks have nothing.  There is a lot to be grateful in any situation and when someone does that constantly, it bothers me personally.

Is that what goes on in Life Coaching, a b----- session?

How do you protect yourself from the negative energy of that?

Here’s my answer: Your question is a good one and I'll give you my thoughts as they occur to me.

• I'd never let  a  situation  like  this happen with a client because we pretty much know that we are a good fit before we start coaching and I always get permission to jump in when I get their story. So I interrupt.  Part of  the  reason  I  jump  in is my having self awareness.  I  listen to the feelings  around the comments  expressed  by my  clients.

• That's not what coaching (with me) is about. The reason I didn't become a therapist was because I could never see myself just sitting and listening to someone's problems. I'm about positive change. (I know all therapy isn't about that but I was young and didn't know it then.) The positive change is teaching the clients about self awareness   too.

• I'd hate doing that. I hate doing that for anyone because it brings me down and makes me feel powerless myself. (This doesn't mean I'm not compassionate to friends, family and clients. It does mean exactly what it says.)

• When I get off I coaching call, I'm high. If that doesn't happen most of the time, this coaching relationship isn't working and I know it.

Does this mean I’m heartless? No. It means clients pay me to help them get un-stuck. How would I be helping them do that if I just let them stay stuck in their problem? Once I understand what they want to change, my job as life coach is to help them stay focused in that direction.

So, bottom line, I don’t have to deal with the negative energy because I don’t experience it.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Keeping a Gratitude Journal

Expressing Gratitude - Start Now

One of the ways to stay focused on the habit of expressing gratitude is by writing in a gratitude journal.

The benefits:

• Being grateful for what you have right now opens a window for more blessings to enter into your life.
• When you write down what you are grateful for, it puts things in an entirely new perspective.
• You start to realize how abundant your life is right now at this very moment.

Keeping a gratitude journal keeps you focused on all that is good in your life and subconsciously you begin to expect more good things. It can be a simple notebook or a decorative journal. Your journal is very personal and should reflect who you are. Don't worry about writing the wrong thing or any spelling errors. Let your thoughts flow and write whatever first comes to mind. If you experience writer's block, start by writing..."I am so happy and grateful for..." Start out with a list of at least 10 things you're grateful for. Try this out for 30 days and your awareness for prosperity and abundance in your life will greatly increase.

I met a beautiful, vibrant woman recently who weighed 88 pounds, in a wheelchair given a week to live. That was 20 years ago! She met Dr. Bernie Siegel, who taught her to keep a gratitude journal. She said the first day she could only find one thing of the five he suggested she list. So repeated "I am grateful for the ray of sun through the clouds" five times. She said by day 30 she had over 130 things on her list. She is a traditional health person, as is Bernie Siegel, and she teaches all her patients the power of keeping a gratitude journal.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

How to Be Happy with Yourself – That Is the Question

Oh, my mother would have loved to tell me how to be happy with myself.

• She’d tell me to make sure I looked good whenever I go out because you never know who you’re going to meet. What she meant by that was that maybe I’d meet the right guy that would come and take care of me the rest of my life.
  
  
  
  • Well, right away this was a problem for me since I thought I was fundamentally defective and couldn’t look good.
  
  
  • She’d tell me go to the right college (so I’d find that same right guy that I might meet when I went out looking good). I did just that. I went to Rutgers University and graduated in 3 ½ years. And I even met a guy. Today I’d call him the “right guy” because married to him I learned that how I looked or what college I graduated or choosing a guy just because he looked good enough would never make me happy. That big long 19 year relationship lesson taught me that being happy with myself is an inside job.

So if the guy’s not the answer and how I look isn’t the answer and going to a top college isn’t the answer, how can I be happy with myself?

Stop for a moment and go look in the mirror. What do you see? Is all you see only what’s wrong with you?

Or if I told you to go write a list of your accomplishments would you have a little voice piping up and letting you know that those things are no big deal? Does it say you didn’t do such a great job or that someone else did better?

Or do you know your accomplishments and like how you look in the mirror and STILL aren’t happy with yourself?

If you said yes to any of the above, you are living with some level of damaged self-esteem. Babies don’t have damaged self-esteem. They are quite pleased with themselves. You were a baby and when you were, you were quite pleased with yourself. So what happened? Why are you not happy with yourself now?

Because I grew up in a family that ended up making me feel quite lousy about and with myself and the feelings got more than I could stand, I’ve made a study of how to feel happy with myself for over 40 years. And it’s worked. I feel quite happy with myself.

So how did I do it? Or more importantly, how can you do it? How can you learn to feel happy with yourself?

I’ve discovered that the method is like a 3-legged stool. If you only have 2 of the legs, the stool will topple. If you don’t deal with all three of the areas I’m going to talk about, you probably won’t learn to feel good about yourself i.e. the stool won’t work.

Let’s talk about BELIEF as the first leg of the stool. You have some mistaken beliefs about yourself that you picked up somewhere between that baby who was happy with herself and the adult who’s reading this because you don’t feel happy with yourself. Now you may try or have tried some of the tricky things you find in self-help books or online sites and you still really can’t seem to change your inner belief that you’re somehow not ok.

The second leg of the stool is HEALING. This is the one that most people neglect. We all have a past. Something or some things happened between the happy-with-self baby you were and the unhappy-with-self adult you’ve become. If you are willing to heal your past, then you will be able to change your beliefs about yourself. Your past is holding you to those erroneous beliefs as if you had invisible leg irons keeping your there. If healing the past sounds like something you resonate with, take a look at how this emotion-based program, might help.

Now once you heal the past and can begin to see the falseness of your negative beliefs about yourself and a very interesting thing occurs. You learn how to take INSPIRED ACTION – the third leg of the stool. In other words, you trust your gut, your intuition, your hunches on how to proceed in your life and soon enough because you are connecting to your own inner wisdom, you discover you are quite happy with yourself.

This is not an overnight process but it doesn’t take too long either. In a matter of a few months, you can be on your merry and happy way with tools to take you through a fabulous and very happy rest of your life.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

On The Phone- How Does Life Coaching Work?

I Don't Have an Office

How does life coaching work over the phone? 100% of the life coaching I do is over the telephone. I live in California and coach people in N.J., Florida, N.Y., Nevada. I even have clients who live in England and Scotland. Since long distance is so inexpensive these days, it's easy. It also means the coach does not have to have an office. She just has to have a phone and a place to sit down - at minimum. She can have (and most do) a good headset and a nice, non-distracting setting in which to sit.

But you might wonder if it is most effective for the client and I will wholeheartedly answer, YES!

I have the ability to read energy. A quote from Gia Combs-Ramirez who says,

Reading energy is our ability to perceive vibrations in our surrounding environment and interpret them correctly. The human body has many mechanisms for doing this, most notably the energy field that surrounds us.

I could have probably quoted some science to prove my point but you can prove it yourself. How do you know someone is angry with you when they smile and say nothing? Or, how do you know when a baby is satisfied when they can't talk?

Start noticing if this is a gift you have developed. I think I developed this gift as a child because I was very afraid of my mother and was always energetically checking in to see how she was feeling so I'd be prepared for her emotional onslaughts. I used to just be hyper-vigilant. Now I live a happy, peaceful life and so I have honed this skill and use it to communicate with my clients and feel what's going on with them.

So that's why I find phone coaching so effective. It allows me to totally tune into my clients with no visual cues to get in my way.

And if I'm not sure, I don't just presume. I ask. So then I am modeling good communication skills which is one of the areas most clients want to improve.

So how does life coaching work over the phone? Very well!

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Are you asking how to improve your self esteem?

Is Asking How to Improve Your Self Esteem Even Important?

Self-esteem may not seem that important to some (they're probably feeling fine about themselves) but it has a huge impact on your daily life. It has an effect on your moods, your reactions and how people treat you. So it is important to ask how to improve your self-esteem.

Seek learning on how to get past negative emotions like anger, jealousy and blame and not let them overshadow your thinking.

Everyone experiences small episodes of these harmful emotions but if you let them be your whole focus, you will never be happy and everyone you meet will know it.

In addition, these emotions build up and create harmful physical conditions like heart disease and high blood pressure. Make sure you laugh every day. Watch a comedy show to lift your mood. You can’t possibly feel hopeless or angry if you are laughing.

Following are more ways how to improve your self-esteem:

1. Increase your self-esteem by doing nice things for other people. They don’t even need to know you did it. In fact, it might is better if they don’t. It will make you feel very good about yourself though, and that is what is important.
2. Stop criticizing every little mistake you make. Watch the words you say about yourself. No more "stupid" or "dummy". Everyone makes mistakes.
3. Take all those negative things you are thinking about yourself and turn them into positive thoughts and your self-esteem will be on the rise one little step at a time.
4. Learn to choose how you respond to whatever situation you may find yourself in. You can decide to calmly handle a situation with as little stress and bad feelings as possible or you can freak out yell, scream, cry and make a bad situation worse.
5. And if your emotional residue from the past is so large it doesn't feel like you have a choice, seek help – self-help, coaching or therapy. Whatever suits you.
6. Another way to make yourself feel better and give your self-esteem a little boost is to dress up now and then for no reason. It will make you feel good knowing that you look good. Do not allow yourself any criticisms about how you look, only good thoughts.
7. If you up for a real stretch, ask 3 people what they like about you. Let what they say about you wash over you. Let it in and just say, "Thank you".

The next time you ask how to improve your self-esteem, think back to this list and get to work.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching