Why you need a life coach

If you have ever invested in a personal development program or listen to podcasts on how to be successful by any of the world’s great gurus, there is one thing you will notice them all repeat:

You need to work with a life coach.

A life coach will take you from average to excellent, from excellent to amazing, amazing to mind blowing.

I have it set as pillar number four in my 5 Steps to Rapid Change. It’s absolutely true, the fastest way to reach your goals is to work with a mentor or life coach and surround yourself with people who have already achieved what you are attempting!

It’s the single most important thing to do to achieve success, do it, and you will absolutely get there, except the funny thing is, very few people actually do it! They choose to claw through solo, they do the other four steps with gusto and enthusiasm and usually, they don’t make it. They just can’t seem to find a way past obstacles or keep that end goal in sight.

I’m going to tell you this right now, you can’t do it on your own. Even the best (especially the best) have a second opinion on hand. A second opinion doesn’t mean a sounding board that tells you nice things, you need someone who will objectively give you more options in a situation and keep you moving forward.

I have a team of coaches and mentors who I see regularly, and who I can trust to tell me the truth. At one point in my life, I was launching new businesses every month, and my mentor banned me! He wasn’t going to work with me anymore if I launched another business!

This is why you need a life coach. A coach says, “Are you looking at this the right way?”

Usually, the answer is no. No, you are not looking at this the right way. If you are stuck you are probably making one mistake over and over and over and expecting a different result (it’s also known as insanity). Without even knowing it you will be clutching to an inaccurate perception of yourself, your ability or the situation that blinds you and holds you back from achieving your goal, or achieving it in a timeframe that is relevant to your success.

Q. Why don’t you have a life coach?

a) It’s too embarrassing to ask for help

b) I’m not worth investing in

c) I know myself well enough to figure it out

d) A coach will only expose my flaws and inabilities

e) All of the above

They are all wrong, and here is why. The stuff that you see, the things that you ‘know’ only exist in your unconscious mind. The reality is always going to be different, sometimes only a little bit different, sometimes, radically different. Your subconscious is fully convinced it is right, it is important, and it will tell you (repeatedly) that it takes priority over everything else.

“I know my brain is the most important part of my body, then I stop and consider, who’s telling me that.”

Self-preservation is your unconscious mind’s number one priority. It will never back down or make itself redundant, which can be costly, because you continue to follow all suggestions. Even if it’s wrong, even if you sabotage, slide backwards or fall into despair, your subconscious will continue to tell you, “I’m right, the rest of the world is wrong”.

You need a coach who can question you. The right questions, especially the ones designed with NLP models, are absorbed without resistance, because your subconscious is the one who discovers the answer. Your subconscious gets to be smarter and will adapt and use positive information super fast, deleting old and inaccurate information in favour of quick results.

A great coach will never have you feeling that you are wrong or inferior, a great coach will stimulate excitement, opportunity and choices, and your subconscious will expand and grow with possibility and pleasure, thinking, “Yes, I know the answer, I’m awesome.”

Having a coach is a reward and a way of opening doors to success and achievement, a lot of people think it is opposite, a punishment for not being able to get there alone or see the way.

The success you gain is all yours, you do the work, a coach only asks questions, hints at options and makes impartial suggestions. You are the one who answers, adapts what you learn to your lifestyle and creates change.

When your mind is opened to faster and more efficient pathways to results it will happily take them. So now that I have highlighted how a great coaching system works, it’s a good idea to point out what you get from it.

Accountability.

This is the number one biggest factor that can help you get to your goal. It’s all too easy to slip back into old habits, no matter how negative or harmful they may be or how badly you want to be rid of them. Without accountability, you can sneak back into the shadows bit by bit until you are right back where you started, or worse, rock bottom. Once you verbalise your intention and set a deadline you cut out the haze of ‘someday’.

You need to start preparing and take action immediately to take steps to your goal being completed when you said it would. You automatically gain motion and incentive to continue. Accountability eliminates procrastination and hurdles you over those limiting decisions and negative beliefs you tell yourself, how you never finish what you start, that you can’t learn new things, that you are not good at being organised, that you have too many other things to do. These excuses stop when you have a coach and your goal takes the priority it deserves. Accountability means you actually follow through!

Rapid Results.

One excuse I love is, “I don’t have time for a Life Coach”. Usually, a coaching session is just one hour a fortnight and in return, you rapidly get your goal completed. Actually, you don’t have time to be without your life coach. The biggest thing you save with a coach is time, massive amounts of it.

A life coach will help you design a map that gives you step by step instructions to get to your goal. Without it, you’ll wander all over the place, exerting energy on trivial things and getting lost and disillusioned. Where would you look for buried treasure if you didn’t have a map?

If unexpected things get in your way a life coach can easily help you decide if this obstacle is important or not, eliminating the internal war that can often arise with conflicting agendas. There is always a clear and easy answer, a good coach will keep you on path, like a guide through the Amazon, to the point marked X.

It’s not just time that you save but emotional energy as well. The positive power and clarity that comes from knowing where you are heading and the purpose of your daily movements makes decision making crystal clear and instantaneous.

The map your coach designs with you intertwines your unique skills and destination with their coaching experience, objectivity and the fact that they have been in this exact situation themselves. Their personal and professional experience will cut your stumbling and dithering time down to almost nothing.

More Money.

Most of us don’t get paid what we are worth, because we underestimated our ability, unique approach and skill set. It usually is an indicator that we don’t value ourselves very much, or at all. When you start to realise your genuine self-worth and recognise your ability you can take simple and fast steps to correct your financial standings. This is especially true for business coaching. When you start out in business you usually have no idea about anything (at all). Street smarts outweigh book smarts tenfold in the business world, there is only one way to gain that knowledge, and that’s to make a heap of mistakes. Most billionaires today look back at the start of their career and see how many costly mistakes they made, mistakes that now seem obvious, and almost cost them everything. Yes they put it down to a learning curve but how many others didn’t make it that far? It’s easy to invest everything you have in a start-up and spend that money poorly. A coach will steer you through the blank unknown by giving you their skillset, knowing what to look for and watching out for giant pitfalls, minimizing your mistakes and maximising your income.

Outside of business a coach can save you money by ensuring you get the most out of your personal investments, like the gym membership you don’t use, the protein drinks that cost $30 a sachet, the money you throw away on advice from other people that you leave sitting on your hard drive. A good coach can help you determine what works for your lifestyle and your goals so you can stop investing money in everyone else, and start investing in you. Every dollar you spend goes to your overall goal, and it quickly adds up to something big.

Harmony and Satisfaction.

When we are not living the life we want we can get stressed, anxious and frustrated. A life coach will teach you how to change your thinking, the words you use, even your posture to align you with your internal personal power. By learning positive communication techniques as well as how to take full responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, you can quickly and easily get back on track and feel connected with yourself and your family, and also experience a genuine harmony that the universe is working with you, not against you. A coach can also help you establish boundaries that will enable you to put an end to feeling taken for granted, suffocated or even abused. These boundaries can work at work, in your business, in your family and the way you treat yourself. When you are calm and satisfied you get a better quality of life, make great decisions on how you spend your time, can stop doing the work of other people and maintain an equilibrium you only thought possible on yoga retreats!

Brain waves.

Your imagination is the most powerful tool you have. When unleashed you can do absolutely anything. Many of us keep our imaginations caged. Ever read a great book or watched a great movie and thought, ‘I wish I could be that creative’… well you can, you are. When you release the limitations of doubt, fear, even the confines of ‘reality’ as well as unlock yourself from the prison of the good opinion of others, your brain will flood with incredible ideas. A life coach will make suggestions your creative mind will latch onto and expand, providing unlimited income options, business ideas, even home renovations or travel prospects. Whatever you want you can have, you just need to be brave enough to follow the inkling there.

“The significant problems we face can not be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Albert Einstein

New Insights.

Think you know yourself? Your mind plays all kinds of tricks and has a truckload of secrets. A life coach teases out unknown labels and beliefs you have stored as well as hidden agendas that may have been ticking away in the background since childhood.

What compels you to do things?

What are your highest values?

What motivates you?

All these questions have solid answers that will reveal incredible things about who you are. Knowing yourself better helps improve your relationships in all capacities, because you improve your confidence, your self-worth and your decision-making skills. It will also propel you rapidly toward your goal as you realise why you want this at the deepest levels and how important it is to you.

During your coaching sessions, your life coach will constantly give you feedback and guide you towards greater self-exploration and discovery.

Self-Belief

Over time our self-belief becomes squashed and bullied as we gradually take on little ‘punches’ here and there as family, friends, teachers, TV shows, books we read, schools, all contain opportunities for us to make lifelong decisions about what we can and cannot achieve. We file these thoughts and feeling about ourselves in our subconscious and allow them to run like a computer system in our day-to-day lives.

When working with a life coach those beliefs and limiting thoughts we have gathered will come to the surface to be examined, giving you an opportunity to take another look, and evaluate the belief again to reassess your ability.

As we start to unburden ourselves of the proof we carry around that we are limited, powerless and unworthy we give ourselves room to build new evidence that we are immensely powerful, with an untapped ability and endless worth.

With new beliefs and understanding of our inner capacity, we can start to take action on projects we always desired but never dared to work towards. It’s a powerful time of self-healing and incredible possibility that comes through gentle questions and awareness of our old wounds.

A coach might even dare you, and if you are brave enough to complete that dare, incredible things can happen.

I once dared a coaching client to ask someone out after ‘having his heart broken so he could never be with anyone again’. He was sure he would get rejected so he decided to ask out a shop assistant who he thought was way out of his league. He figured if he was going to be rejected, he might as well go to the top shelf. Guess what, she said yes, they fell in love and are happily married. To this day he is still astounded that that happened. I never doubted him for a minute!

It works

Every sports star, no matter who they are, has a coach. Why? Because they can’t see what they are doing when they are doing it. A coach, who knows the sport and the game inside out, can give instant feedback, correction and new tactics on the fly. Without it, the competition would out play them.

Successful millionaires have expert coaches who can give solid financial and buying advice without hesitation.

Successful coaches have mentors that keep revealing their inner workings and ask them to play a bigger game so they are always have something to demonstrate and teach their clients.

One step ahead is a rapid success system that works and you can get it quickly and easily by playing a bigger game, going outside your perceived limits and saying yes to your deepest desires.

Matt Catling