Life Coaching as a Discipline - Case Study Example

Case study Name Institution Instructor Unit Date Introduction Life Coaching as a discipline relates to assisting individuals attain their set goals in life. To accomplish this, individual clients must identify the goals they want to achieve under a set time limit. This particular case presents an overview of my personal experience in life coaching both as a coach and as a coachee. The events in my experience are connected to life coaching theory where applicable. As a life coach In the coaching session with my client I used knowledge learnt in class to handle him and make him a better person by achieving his goals in life. The session started with a review of my role as a coach. It was important that client understood my role and place in the interview as coach. For this reason, I asked him why he thought he required the services of a life coach. The client indicated that he needed guidance on how to become a successful professional life coach once he graduated from college by improving presentation skills and image as a professional. The client desired to make himself a better life coach by strengthening some of the major skills required of a life coach such as listening ability, empathy, positivism, and patience among others. Given there are many types of coaching, I recognized the session required skills coaching approach. “All coaching involves coachees acquiring new skills or enhancing current ones” (Skiffington & Zeus, 2003. p. 243) and hence in this particular case I had to make the client improve on his presentation skills and confidence levels. Skiffington and Zeus further advise that skills-coaching is best accompanied by training. Furthermore, “training programs provide a structured approach to learning and are usually generic, but may be tailored to meet organisational needs” (section 9, p. 3). However, they are not generally designed to meet individual needs but they can be modified. In this instance, I chose to develop a simple training program to assist the client in achieving the goals. However, under this program, it was almost impossible to formulate and articulate goals as required by the SMART model. This is anticipated in coaching for skills (section 9). To capture the actual character traits that we could address in the session, I gave the client a Character Strengths Profile survey popularly used in positive psychology (Passmore, 2008). The client ranked resourcefulness and friendliness as his main strengths with shyness, and low self-esteem as his major weaknesses. The client indicated that he had already contemplated about working on his weaknesses but was at times inclined to think he can do well with the strengths he had already. This situation corresponds with the pre-contemplation and contemplation stages described by Lifesystems101.com (2010). Therefore, as a coach, I was to assist the client move along the other stages of change namely, preparation, action and maintenance. I used the narrative approach to explore areas of his childhood that were probably affecting him. One of the issues that came up as we discussed his relationship with his parents as a child was that he felt that he was not good enough. He had lived with the weight of expectation from his parents by virtue of being a first child. John Bowlby’s Attachment theory relates childhood attachments with later social development of individuals. The theory claims that adults’ behaviour is related to the issues they faced during their childhood stage (Siegelman & Rider 2009). Therefore, the client was affected by his childhood and was likely to be harsh on himself and lack confidence to undertake new challenging tasks for fear of failure. The coaching program that I suggested to him aimed at exposing the client to coaching sessions with numerous clients in a pressure-free situation. Therefore, the client had to interview clients who were relatively easy to coach based on their life and career and form coaching relationships with them. I figured that adult clients were more mentally challenging to the client but working with them would boost his confidence and presentation skills. Furthermore, other conducting personal coaching sessions, he would conduct group coaching session to improve on his confidence in addressing a crowd and putting across his ideas. This would enable him to put to practice his weak skills to give him a more balanced characters profile in regards to working as a professional life coach. I suggested volunteering at a nursing home where he could coach the old people on ways of aging gracefully and form attachment with them. To ascertain whether the session had achieved, the client was required to continuously conduct coaching sessions at the nursing home for a week. The coachee would monitor and assess the progress of his clients on a day to day basis to assess his own progress in working as a professional life coach. His presentation skills would be best challenged and improved by coaching a group rather than individuals. It was expected that the client would have more belief in his abilities through practice. To evaluate his progress, a follow session will involve the client taking another VIA character survey test to note any improvement in the ranking of the said character traits that needed improvement. As a coachee The session with the client started with the client explaining to me his role as life coach. I informed the coach that I wanted suggestions on how to interact with aboriginal communities and gain their trust to learn their culture and language without appearing being nosy or disruptive. The coach acknowledged that my goals were very creative and well thought out. He set out to assess the suitability of my goals through the GROW model. This model’s name is an acronym for Goals, Reality, Options, Wrap Up (Whitmore, 2002). Apart from being popular in the business world, the GROW model is also applicable in day to day life. The GROW model unlike other methods of training provides an effective, organized approach which both helps formulate goals effectively and is a problem solving system (Whitmore, 2002). The first step in the model involved analysing my goals and clearing out any unclear issues. One of them was “learning aboriginal culture.” The coach advised me that the goal was vague hence needed to be more clear on what aspects of their culture I was interested in. I indicated that I was interested in learning aboriginal kinship and family structure and its impacts on communication within the first two months and learn at least two basic aboriginal languages within the first year. This I would achieve by interacting with fellow Aboriginal students. Under the SMART goal formulation model, the goals were specific, measurable, action oriented, realistic and with a recognized time limit (section 5). The coach then assessed the reality in my case. He asked me what experience I had in relating with international students, Aboriginal students and other immigrant populations in my campus and in the country. The coach informed me that it was important to assess one’s ability in taking up new languages and interest in new cultures. He believed that being adventurous and curious naturally would make one interested in learning new languages and new cultures. This opened up the next issue under the GROW model on the options. The coach asked whether the strategies I had used in relating and working with international students could apply in relating Aboriginal communities. We then explored a number of options available in interacting with new cultures and languages. The coach also suggested learning a new language from the native speakers children. He believed that the children were best placed to teach someone a new language because their language skills had not been affected by other languages and the environment or other languages as they rarely use slangs and colloquialism in their language. I settled for the option of learning the language from young aboriginal children but learning their culture from adults. To do this, the coach advised me to spare some time to volunteer at aboriginal community schools. I was to carry out my own research to identify some of the few schools in rural areas that use aboriginal languages as the language of instruction. This would help me learn the basics of the language and the culture by interacting both with aboriginal teachers and the young students. A follow up session scheduled for later would assess how the chosen strategy was helping me accomplish my goals. Conclusion In conclusion, this exercise has been very helpful for my personal and professional development. As an aspiring life coach, I got a chance to “walk in a client’s shoes” and feel first-hand what they experience from life coaches. This exercise taught me how to be more responsive to client needs and widen my knowledge on various responses. Furthermore, I learned the application and importance of a number of life coach skills such as goal-setting, active listening and how to be empathic, and make use of opportunities as sessions progresses. This offered me a chance to compare how I perform as life coach and how others perform. All in all, despite the challenges, the exercise has been helpful and a valuable learning opportunity. 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