What is coaching and how can it help?
The term coach hadn’t really been on my radar until about 5 years ago.
Until then if you’d said ‘coach’, I would have thought of sport, and more specifically John Travolta in grease, when he was trying out lots of different sports with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. (He featured much in my thoughts as a teenager ;-)
I’d heard of a life coach but that always felt a bit vague and, well, cheesy.
It was when I started my own business that the world of business and life coaching opened up to me.
If you're in that world then it can seem like everyone is a coach! I kind of get why, because since I've had coaching, it has made the BIGGEST difference to my life, which must play a part in why I trained to be one.
Having a good coach can make a positive difference to your life.
There are lots of different types of coach, business, life, relationship, sports, work, executive, subconscious, etc
And they will help you focus on one area that seems to be challenging or keeping you stuck.
I believe this is a big part of the process. Giving yourself the space and time. These days giving focused attention to something is hard!
Coaching can get tangled up with other things, and it is an unregulated industry so the quality and experience of coaches is very variable.
What coaching is not…
It is not therapy, although it can have therapeutic qualities. It shouldn’t analyse the past or make you revisit traumatic things.
It's not mentoring, which is more about giving advice and guidance.
It's not like having a good friend to make you feel better
All of these are totally valid and good things, and coaching can work alongside them really well.
Coaching is….
….a process that aims to validate, support and empower you to reflect and gain awareness of who you are. So that you can make internal shifts and a plan of the next best steps for you.
The role of a coach is to support you to improve or work through something. They do this by asking powerful questions and holding space for you to work through your challenges.
Unlike teaching, a coach isn’t an expert imparting knowledge. They are a support for you to gain awareness of what's going on inside you and that is what makes it so powerful, it’s because it comes from within you.
There is no opinion, judgement or teaching from the coach.
When you realise something from the inside out rather than being told from the outside how to do/feel/be on the inside, it’s super powerful.
Coaching is always forward focused and you should leave a coaching session with a clear plan for what you are going to do next.
I believe this is specifically important for mums.
We are always being told what to bloody do and feel and expect from ourselves. Whether it's from companies trying to sell us stuff, authorities that believe they’re trying to help us, or our own families, friends, colleagues or strangers in the street!
I’m on a mission to break down the idealisation of motherhood and the myth of the perfect mum, which is constantly projected onto us. I believe we need more than ever to find out what we really want from inside ourselves.
In contrast to popular belief, motherhood is complex and messy as Elaine Glaser puts it in her book ‘Motherhood and Manifesto’, ‘The way motherhood is organised today is an outrage that would be clearly visible if we didn’t think it was the job of individual mothers to hold it all together.’
On the flip side, the other thing we get told as mums is to trust our instincts. What a contradiction!
And for clarity my coaching is not about searching for the instinctual or natural mum inside ourselves. (I question how helpful this is as a concept but that is for another blog.)
And.
While I do believe we all have an internal knowledge about who we are and what we want (whether we are mums or not).
I don’t believe we always have access to it let alone time to stop and listen inwards.
Plus, most of us have had so little chance to practise it in our lives, because it's not a valued skill that we get taught as kids, and like any other skill, it takes some working out and practice.
This is where coaching can be so helpful.
It can act like a bridge between your internal and external worlds.
What makes it so valuable is the safe and completely judgement free space in which to explore what is really going on for you.
Here are some of the challenges that coaching can help with:
Feeling stuck
Constantly saying you’ll do something then not doing it
Constantly saying you won’t do something, then doing it
Feeling like a bad mum
Feeling unfulfilled
Not knowing what to do
Mum guilt
The mental load
Dissatisfaction
Knowing you need to look after yourself more but not knowing how to do it.
You can have a one off coaching session, which can be good for a very specific issue.
Or you can have a series over a period of time. And in my experience this is where you can make some serious headway from where you are now to where you want to be.
It's also a relationship so finding someone who you connect with makes a difference.
Before I discovered coaching I was always drifting in a space where I needed some support but it wasn’t from a friend or a doctor, or therapy…(although I do also have therapy). Coaching has really helped me fill that space for support and space holding that I couldn't find anywhere else.
Have you ever considered it? Now you know more, can you see how it might help you?