You’ve probably noticed that life coaching has become trendy in recent times. The Internet makes it easier than ever to connect with a mentor who is ideally suited for you and your goals.
Contrary to popular belief, hiring a coach doesn’t automatically mean there’s something wrong in your life. It simply means that you’re looking to improve in key areas.
People hire assistance for everything from sports to business or organization, and life coaching is no different.
Working with someone in this way is a great method for defining your goals, becoming stronger in yourself, and learning how to stop self-sabotage in its tracks.
With assistance from an objective outside party, you can gain quick access to new ideas you wouldn’t have thought up on your own. However, life coaching is far from cheap, and many of us have busy or unpredictable schedules.
Considering this, you might be asking: is a life coach worth it? Depending on the answer you come up with, maybe you can life coach yourself instead. We’ll go over some of the benefits of working with a life coach, followed by average costs, and what steps to take if you’d rather do it yourself.
The Benefits of Hiring a Life Coach
We mentioned a few of the benefits of hiring a coach above, but let’s look a bit closer at the specific advantages you may experience in working with one.
First of all, a life coach can give you an objective perspective.
No one gives us a map for how to make it through life. As a result, many people are walking around confused about how to navigate their own minds.
They find that, however hard they try, there appears to be opposition at every turn. And most of it comes from within!
Growing up in the modern world, we’re all given a set of values. We’re told what makes us acceptable, which emotions are okay to feel, and which aspects of ourselves we must hide.
As we grow up, this input from the external world helps to form our beliefs about ourselves.
For example, you might have been chastised for showing frustration as a child. Now, years into adulthood, you may feel guilty for days on end for showing the smallest amount of frustration.
While it’s a small belief (frustration is “bad”) that leads to this hang up, it has major effects on your life. You’re basically operating under a program without realizing that there is one to begin with!
Hiring a good coach will help you determine what beliefs you might be holding onto that are hindering your growth. Once you become aware of what’s getting in the way, a better life suddenly becomes more accessible.
Hiring a Coach for Help in a Specific Area
Everyone has their strengths (what they’re naturally good at) and their more challenging areas. You might have a thriving and healthy relationship, for example, but struggle with meeting your goals at work.
A life coach can give you targeted assistance to improve key areas of your life. Each coach will have their own unique approach to set their clients up for success, along with their own area of life coaching specialization.
Here are some of the most popular areas.
Health and Wellness:
A health and wellness life coach can assist you with losing weight or developing a healthier diet plan. If you’re doing fine in your business but find that all those hours are causing you stress, your coach could suggest specific methods to combat that.
Spiritual Fulfillment:
Another popular area for coaching is spirituality. Whether you’re religious, atheist, or somewhere in between, everyone needs purpose to feel fulfilled in life. A spiritual life coach can help you get in touch with your own magic and joy again.
Family and Parenting:
If you find yourself struggling to communicate with your loved ones or feel unsure about your capacity to be a new parent, coaching can help. Many life coaches specialize in giving their clients strategies for healthy family relations.
Dating and Relationships:
It’s no secret that relationships are challenging! By working on-on-one with a coach for dating or relationships, you can figure out what’s holding you back from the type of love you desire.
Creativity:
Many people mistakenly believe that they are “not creative.” But to be human is to be creative. If you’d like help with accessing your own inner artistic genius, hiring a coach could be the ticket for you.
How Much Does Life Coaching Cost?
Now that we’ve gone over some of the amazing benefits of hiring a life coach, it’s time to discuss cost.
As mentioned, it’s not the cheapest service out there. But hiring a life coach may still be worth it for you, depending on your priorities.
Now…
There are a couple of main ways that life coaches structure their fees: hourly sessions or package deals.
Individual sessions are suitable for people who want life coaching assistance for the short term, or on an occasional basis. You’ll typically find life coaches charging between $75 and $200 as an hourly rate. However, some charge less or more than that.
Some coaches operate based on the amount of time you’ll work with them. For example, one month of weekly sessions for $400, or two months of weekly calls for $700.
You’ll typically get a price break for ordering a package of sessions rather than individual coaching calls.
While some coaches will include contact between calls as part of their service, others will only communicate during session time. Each coach is unique and will have their own approach to fees, so make sure you ask plenty of questions!
Simply put, life coaching can be expensive if you get a lot of sessions, but can be tailored for affordability. Many clients, for instance, choose to buy a session once per month instead of once a week so it costs less overall.
If life coaching sounds like it’s out of your price range or isn’t worth the money to you at this time, don’t despair! There’s another option available: life-coach yourself.
Is It Possible to Life Coach Yourself?
Just because life doesn’t come with an instruction manual doesn’t mean you can’t learn to give yourself the coaching you need. The fact that you exist at all should mean that you already have all the tools you need to function.
While it’s immensely helpful to hire a professional, you can certainly make progress on your own by coaching yourself. The key ingredients here are confidence and a willingness to learn.
Confidence has different definitions depending on who you ask. For the sake of this topic, we’ll define it as “an unshakeable belief in your ability to meet your goals.”
Pair that belief with laser sharp focus and you’re ready to create your own personal plan to improve your life.
Life coaching exists to bring people more harmony, balance, and objectivity in their lives. We live in the freedom of information era where anything you could possibly hope to learn is available online.
To successfully coach yourself, you’ll need to know which specific area to start with. You can expand this to include several areas later, but it’s best to start small and simple.
If anxiety is what’s troubling you most right now, for instance, stress management is a great place to begin.
Most people use the Internet to scroll social media and distract themselves. If you decide to become your own life coach, you’ll want to make better use of your time online.
Going back to the stress example, life coaching yourself would begin with learning all you can about stress. You could, for example, make a list of the ways you believe stress is hindering you in life.
Then, list all the positive changes that stress reduction would bring you. Just like that, you already have a framework to get started with in coaching yourself.
Having a Self Coaching Mindset is Everything
Next, it’s time to take a long and honest look at your own mindset. If you decide to coach yourself, this will have a major impact on your success.
Are you willing to ask yourself the hard questions and be honest about your flaws? Do you know how to be kind to yourself when you’re struggling?
If you have a tendency to berate yourself every time you make a mistake, you’ll want to work on that first. Do some research on “how to be kinder to yourself” and learn how to be your own best friend.
Trust me, you’ll save yourself a lot of time by learning how to take that self-sabotaging voice in your head less seriously. We all have it, and most people have simply taken it as a normal part of their lives.
In fact, many individuals allow that voice to dictate their lives completely! They allow it to tell them what they can and cannot do, and believe it when it tells them they aren’t good enough.
As a self-coach, however, this is a habit that you simply can’t keep. Learn to put that nagging voice in your mind in its rightful place.
Practice challenging your assumptions and affirming that you are worthy and more than capable of having a healthy relationship with yourself. At the end of the day, you’re the one who has to live with the voice in your head; no one else.
Once you begin making progress with self-kindness, you’ll have the perfect mindset to life coach yourself.
The Importance of Having a Vision in Self-Coaching
You can’t get where you want to go if you don’t know where that is. While specific goals are an important aspect of coaching (and life in general) they are only a small part of it.
Your long-term vision for success is what will keep you going on those days when you feel like giving up. Here are some questions to get you thinking about your own personal vision for the future:
- What do you want your new life to look like?
- How do you want to feel when you wake up in the morning?
- What would you aim for if you knew that you couldn’t fail?
- What do you want to contribute to the world?
With these questions answered, you’ll have a target to move towards. Your specific self-coaching goals will be the pieces that fill in the main puzzle of your vision.
I recommend keeping a journal to track your vision, goals, and overall progress. You may find that your vision shifts the more you work on yourself, which is natural.
Each week (or month, whatever works for you), sit down and take some time to assess how you’re doing.
What were you proud of from the previous week? What would you like to improve upon for the following week?
Self-coaching is a creative process that you should uniquely tailor to what works for you. There are no rules here, so don’t be afraid to experiment and tweak your approach until you find a good groove.
You should now know the answer to the question: is a life coach worth it—at least for your situation. Often you’ll find that taking a DIY life coaching approach is the best way to go.