What is a Life Coach and Do I Need One?

Life coaching changed my life.

My first experience with a life coach commenced at an extremely critical moment in my life. I was seeking help in my relationship with my mother.

This was early covid-19 quarantine and I had recently moved back into my parents’ home in order to use what would have been rent money to pay off large sums of debt. This is no big deal, right? Wrong. While I love my mother, we have had a very on and off rocky relationship and it always seems to worsen when I lived with her at home. Rocky means we would go days in the same house not speaking to each other—because if we did the conversation was not pleasant. This at home environment became more and more “toxic” and resulted in explosions of anger that seemed irreparable. My mom soon gave me an ultimatum— we seek professional help or I move out.

In between organizing a move to my aunt’s Maryland home, I came upon an opportunity to hire a life coach—she was actually my mom’s best friend. I know what you’re thinking, that’s biased, you cannot possibly repair a relationship with your mom while her best friend as a third party! However, that’s where the life coaching structure aided in our dilemma.

The life coaching session structure is formed in a way that relieves bias through its client centered approach. When coaches question clients to inspire insight or offer a moment of reflection, they, by structure, remove their inclination to offer advice and their opinion. My coach explained this to me before we started sessions and often self-corrected or asked permission when personalizing insights due to her extensive personal relationship with me and my mom.

After a few sessions, I began to really see the results of our coaching. My coach offered a space for me to express what I felt my mother would not hear while challenging me to be a better listener. I began to interact more openly with my mother, we gave more grace and patience to one another within the house, and even the rest of the household saw immediate results. Coaching was especially instrumental because it helped me to immediately address issues that made it difficult to live at my family home.

My coaching experience was transformational. For the first time, I saw my mother as the woman she is and felt she saw me as the woman I am, and who actually valued and loved her mom greatly. This change made it easier to tell her that I was pregnant— with a girl! Yes, this coaching relationship helped me to share my pregnancy with my mother! More importantly, I began to heal my relationship with my mother and that made me more fit to be a girl mom, myself. It had always been a goal of mine to relieve some tension between my mom and I before I had a daughter so that energy would not be transferred into another generation— and I did it!

So life coaching to me is a transformational, experience of developing a relationship with a coach in order to accomplish a goal that seems impossible at the moment. A life coach is a mirror, a push, and a partner who offers resources, accountability, and encouragement in order to create personal growth and change. I believe that when you feel stuck, but desire to change, desire to achieve a goal, desire solutions to your problems, that is the moment you need a coach.

Thanks for reading.

by Atiya J.