8 Common Life Struggles Hiring A Life Coach Can Help You Through
When life sends challenges, coaching helps hurdle hardships at work, with others, and at home.
getty So, work sucks, you're bored, and your relationship is not doing it for you anymore — now what? Have you ever considered hiring a life coach?
Many people report their successes after working with a life coach. And, it's exciting to consider for yourself.
Let's face it, how often have you had someone strictly devoted to your performance and well-being?
But how do you know when to hire a coach? How do you know what you're getting when the market seems completely saturated?
Here are 8 common life struggles that hiring a life coach can help you get through.
1. Your confidence is not where you want it to be.
Self-confidence is built on many things. People don't just enter the world being confident. Instead, many attributions, skills talents, and aspects work together to build confidence.
However, one determining factor is when you take on challenges and do hard things.
And, what's important is not whether you "win" or succeed, but when you attempt, learn, and build on your experiences along the way.
Some people call this "failing forward." Coaching is an experiential, co-created agreement to have a non-biased accountability partner.
2. A coach can help you build resilience and navigate unresolved feelings lurking below the surface.
Everyone has battle scars. You don't live this long without some. Often the distinction between those who are happy and those who struggle with finding regular happiness is resilience.
According to Psychology Today, resilience is the psychological quality that allows some people to be knocked down by the adversities of life and come back at least as strong as before.
Rather than letting difficulties, traumatic events, or failure overcome them and drain their resolve, highly resilient people find a way to change course, emotionally heal, and continue moving toward their goals.
A coach can help you develop the ability to distance from past feelings, and accept the past as the past. Holding unresolved feelings feels much like holding an air-filled beach ball under the water — and it can be simply exhausting.
You can work to consistently push it down, but feelings of grief, trauma, or sadness have a way of creeping back. When you hire a coach, you have a professional partner to help you face those wounds and heal.
3. You’re moody, irritable, or unhinged too often.
Do you find yourself in a state of emotional reactivity too often? Perhaps you're rumbling with friends or family members. Maybe you've become exceptionally sarcastic or negative.
Perhaps you're engaging in road rage or fighting with your partner too often. Deep down you’re wondering: "What's going on? Why do I fight so hard?"
It's possible you're living out of alignment with what matters most to you. If this describes you, consider working with a coach who can help you untangle those threads and tether you back to your moorings.
4. You're spinning your wheels.
There's nothing worse than feeling as though every day is the same and no matter what you do, you're not getting ahead. Perhaps you're treading water, floating along, or avoiding some big, (perhaps risky) decisions.
When you're spinning your wheels, often this is marked by lacking follow-through, inaction, and feeling unsettled.
If you're stuck spinning your wheels in the face of a laundry list of things to do, now may be a good time to hire a coach to help you find your way forward.
5. You have ADHD and it's blocking your progress.
Do you have a hunch or actual diagnosis of ADHD? Do you find yourself stuck procrastinating all the time? If so, your neurochemistry may be at odds with your aspirations.
If you find yourself enslaved by your poor habits, lost in distraction, or overperforming in some places, yet just sliding by in others, you may really benefit from working with an ADHD-trained coach.
Regardless of a diagnosis, if you have a hunch you have ADHD, even working for a short period of time with an ADHD-trained coach can make all the difference for you.
You may have a clear idea about where you want to be, but continue to make self-destructive decisions tied to habits that are less than useful.
If you hire a coach, that person can help you build awareness around how your particular ADHD symptoms manifest and stand in your way.
6. You're overwhelmed too often.
Life's chaos can creep up at any time and throw your sense of balance out of control. If you feel overwhelmed often and have failed at attempts to get on track, coaching can be a good stop along the way.
Perhaps, your home or apartment is a hot mess and chronically disorganized, or you keep forgetting appointments.
Many clients come to coaching driven by feeling overwhelmed. Overwhelm can crop up from external factors, but for some, it is a pattern and coping mechanism.
When this happens, you must begin inside your head with your thoughts, ideas, and beliefs — your mindset.
7. You’re in transition.
Transitions have a known path. When in transition, you move through liminal space.
Liminal spaces are those times where you're not in the previous situation in the past, yet have not yet arrived at your desired future situation.
These are the elevators, escalators, and stairwells of your life. It describes times that are not the past and not yet the future.
If you're in transition you move through a series of uncharted waters, complete with a flood of emotions.
So, if you’re considering a career change, or facing a significant life transition, coaching can support your transition.
Transitions tend to amp up stress, anxiety, and uncertainty. When your foundation is shaking, it's a great time to seek out support to effectively transition into your next steps of life.
8. You’re craving a bigger purpose.
If you're awakened in the middle of the night feeling unfulfilled, you may need to go deep inside to get in touch with your purpose. Or perhaps your purpose and vision are so big you’re feeling stuck or overwhelmed with it all.
A purpose-driven life pays attention to intuition, callings, and prompts built around strengths and values. If you're feeling out of alignment with your purpose, this is a great time to hire a coach.
Coaching offers a safe place to find your pieces, pull them together, and work toward connecting to your bigger purpose.
Personally, I've worked with several coaches over my career. Each time, I've enhanced my skills, expanded my capacity, and the experience has led to a deepened level of self-awareness.
Most specifically, I've changed my behavior to address some bad habits.
Additionally, working with coaches has helped me build my business, heal my marriage, fix my finances, make the transition from a corporate career to my own brand, create and market the TSSI, and deepen my commitment to the work I do, and therefore broaden the impact I make in the world.
What about therapy?
The key difference between coaches and therapists is that mental health practitioners tend to focus on helping you look back to heal trauma or make sense of past behaviors.
On the other hand, coaches help you take your focus from today forward. Coaching helps you move from intention to action.
We focus on an inside-out strategy of positive psychology. While both approaches lie within the field of self-help, therapy is considered mental health.
Coaching sits on the imaginary line between self-efficacy, skills development, and deep awareness. We at times dip our toe into the past, but not dwell there.
Instead, we use the tool of observation to develop deep awareness in order to move from intention to action.
Coaching sees perspective as a mirror to reflect back a type of mindful awareness. This helps you zoom out, and then pivot away from bad habits, and toward your goals and bigger purpose.
Hiring a coach can improve and transform your experience. Most certified coaches subscribe to the belief that all people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole; capable with or without partnership.
Yet, a coach can be an excellent copilot when you're navigating uncharted territory.
Cena Block is a productivity consultant and certified organizer coach (COC) for professional women and entrepreneurs with ADHD. She is also the CEO of Sane Spaces and creator of the Time & Space Style Inventory.