Life coaching

Life coaching is coaching to improve someone's personal or professional life.

It involves a professional partnership between a coach and the client that supports the client's personal growth, through the use of requests and powerful questions from the coach and commitment and responsibility of the client. Through the process of coaching, clients focus on the skills and actions needed to successfully produce their personally relevant results. Life coaching may include physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual aspects of the client's life.

Credentials
Life is used by a growing number of both credentialed (e.g. psychologists) and non-credentialed practitioners to aid clients with transitions in their personal life, and in the process of self-actualization. Currently no regulatory standards exist, and thus no degree or formal training is required to become a life coach. With roots in executive coaching, which itself drew on techniques developed in management consulting and leadership training, life coaching also draws from a wide variety of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, career counseling, mentoring, and numerous other types of counseling. The coach applies mentoring, values assessment, behavior modification, behavior modeling, goal-setting, and other techniques in assisting clients. Coaches are to be distinguished from counselors, whether counselors in psychotherapy or other careers.

Read the book, "My Mentor" by Alec Wilkinson [about his mentor, William Maxwell] for details on what a mentor should do and how to do it. Beautifully detailed descriptions are given of his 20 years being mentored.

Specialization
Coaches tend to specialize in one or more of several areas: career coaching, transition coaching, life or personal coaching, executive coaching, small business coaching, systemic coaching and organizational or corporate coaching. As the internet has grown, life coaching has greatly expanded its online presence. Many life coaching organizations now offer online coaching as well as coaching over the telephone.

Relationship Coaching
Most life coaching is to help individuals reach individual goals. Coaching people to enjoy better relationships, with parents, partners and children, or with team members and managers, needs skills, experience and maturity that younger coaches may lack.

Systemic coaching increases the adaptability and survival potential of relationships. Systemic coaching helps people attain relationship goals and their individual goals. Individual coaching can be embedded within relationship coaching.

Controversy
There is some controversy surrounding life coaching, primarily because of its current unregulated, unstandardized nature. Critics assert that the practice of life coaching amounts to little more than a method of practicing psychotherapy without any restrictions, oversight, or regulation. However, coaches, and the many legislatures that have left them alone after hearings on the matter, maintain that coaching is unlike therapy in that it does not focus on examining nor diagnosing the past, instead focusing on effecting change in a client's current and future behavior.

Life coaching in popular culture
The FX original series Nip/Tuck is credited with introducing the concept of a life coach into popular culture. In its second season, the character Ava Moore was introduced as a life coach, played by Famke Janssen. Her extreme psychological manipulation and villainess persona helped cast appeal and a sentiment of power over the life coaching profession.