LIFE COACHING - YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR PROBLEM IS?

Derek Workman


These days it seems that there's always someone there to pick you up, help you out and give your life a new start.
You can find someone to choose your clothes for you, or sort out your wardrobe, if you already have enough; there's someone to arrange your dinner parties and someone else who will look after your diary, or if life just seems to be too much trouble to do anything at all, you can find a psychotherapist to help you deal with your problems.
Fine as it is to have all this help at hand, if we look closely at ourselves, we can begin to see that we don't actually need all these people to look after us. To help us do this is the role of the Life Coach - someone who won't judge us, who won't tell us what to do and is there to support us in those nervous life decisions that we all have to make.
Mike Lewis was a self-confessed computer geek in his hometown of Southampton, England, but rose high up the corporate ladder in California. He now lives in a small coastal town in Spain where he acts as a Life Coach to clients in Europe, America, India and Australia, chatting with them on a regular basis by telephone. But why should we need anybody to help us along?
A life coach is basically a support system for people who want to make some change in their life. The sig- nificant thing about personal development is this: there's relatively few people that I've ever met that don't want to get on in life, but it's hard to get on if you try and find all this stimulus from the outside. The difference between coaching and other forms of personal development is primarily this: with life coaching, nobody tells you what to do, nobody tells you who you should be, nobody tries to change you 'cause we're all perfect as we are! What a life coach does is encourage you to find the answers to all life's problems from within, not from without.

Fonte: Revista Speak UP, edição 201, fev. 2004.