Coach Dolbec

Pages: 1, 2

The role of a life coach

Peo­ple usu­ally come for coach­ing when they are in the Fall period. And most of the time, they still are in Sum­mer for many aspects of their life, but let’s say their work is unsat­is­fy­ing (there is no more chal­lenge) or with a rela­tion­ship (my friend says I don’t lis­ten) or they just feel some­thing is going wrong with­out being able to put their fin­ger on it. The coach’s role is to help them to find what needs to change, to define appro­pri­ate goals and ways to reach them with­out dam­ag­ing the sat­is­fy­ing aspects of their life.

Though he will explain a con­cept like “what is an objec­tive?” when it is nec­es­sary, the coach does not pro­vide direct answers. Even though he asks ques­tions and guides his client on how to use cer­tain tools (prob­lem solv­ing tech­niques, self inquiry exer­cises, etc.) a coach is not a judge who decides what is good or wrong for his client. On the con­trary, he knows that his client is the only expert of his own life; only his client can decide what his good for him­self. There­fore, a life coach is not a ther­a­pist. His client is not in psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tress; he is com­pletely in con­trol of himself.

All this ques­tion­ing and prob­lem solv­ing phase cor­re­sponds to Win­ter. The buds on the branches are hints, oppor­tu­ni­ties for the client to grow. One could think that the coach is like a gar­dener, but he is not. The client is the gar­dener. His coach is more like a gar­den­ing good spirit who pro­vides guid­ance on keep­ing the rest of the tree in good shape, while the gar­dener decides how to shape a par­tic­u­lar branch on his per­sonal tree of life. The coach will con­tinue to work with the client through­out the Spring phase, while some branches still need spe­cial atten­tion, in other words, until the client is com­fort­able with the change.

This is the ser­vice I am offer­ing to you. Con­tact me to talk about your needs.

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Note: The metaphor about the tree of changes through life came to me while I read about Fred­er­ick Hudson’s works (The cycle of renewal©) . He pro­posed that each aspect of our life goes through a per­pet­ual cycle of renewal.