Life Coaching: The Experience of a Sceptic

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They say the first step on your journey to overcoming an addiction is acknowledging that you have a problem. For me, my addiction was work.

I call it an addiction because I seemingly wasn’t able to stop my bad habits of overworking, and I was mostly blind to the impact of my behaviour on those around me. It sounds extreme, but the effects of overworking can be too, and I know I am not alone in experiencing this struggle.

In mid-2020, during the global coronavirus pandemic, the problem was exacerbated and I decided to do something about it; I began life coaching with Simon. 

What did I learn about life coaching? 

I didn’t know much about life coaching before I started my sessions. I thought it involved a therapist offering worldly wisdom based on their years of lived experience. I was therefore sceptical of any ‘young’ life coaches, after all how much ‘life wisdom’ would they really have to offer? 

As I soon discovered, life coaching is focused on listening, questioning and guiding an individual to achieve specific goals. For me, the experience was important for two key reasons:
 
 

1. Being asked the right questions (and having to answer!). Life coaching helped me to challenge my thinking and repeat behaviours. Questions that seemed so simple, such as ‘why do you work so much?’ were questions I had never stopped to reflect on — and were also surprisingly challenging to answer.
    
2. Developing tools to help me achieve my goals. The life coaching sessions helped me to reflect on my goal and provided tips to help me make practical changes in my life. By attending regular life coaching sessions, I was also being held accountable.

How has life coaching helped me?

Prior to life coaching, I had never considered my overworking to be a problem that needed addressing. I willingly dedicated a significant amount of extra time - my ‘me’ time - to my job and I justified this behaviour with a thousand different excuses.

Through life coaching I have learnt to challenge those thoughts and take practical steps to help make a change, develop healthier habits, and make better choices.

Written by: Danika Ferguson