Essays · · Updated
What Is a Life Coach?
Not a friend in the stands. Someone on the field with you, helping you bridge the gap between the life you lead and the one you are built for.
Greg Murray, Founder, Human Creative Coaching
In short
A life coach helps you build your present and future through counsel, encouragement, and evidence-based growth methods, so you can clarify and reach goals in the personal, professional, and relational arenas of life. Coaching is not therapy and not advice-giving. It is a facilitated process that strengthens your own judgment, so you grow more capable, not more dependent.
In this piece
Have you ever felt as though your life lacks purpose? A gaping hole longing for mission and momentum? Perhaps you've reached a point where you simply don't know what to do with the life ahead.
Maybe you've hit obstacles and are looking for clarity: a huge career change, launching your own company, a quarter-life crisis full of existential questions. Or you're far into a rewarding career, retirement on the horizon, wondering what will bring fulfillment, legacy, and purpose. Or you're launching out of college, daunted by the ocean of possibilities and the mountain you want to climb.
Getting from point A (clarifying the goal) to point B (achieving it) is hard. That is precisely where a life coach comes in.
What is a life coach?
A life coach focuses on building your present and future through counsel, encouragement, and growth methods that help you overcome obstacles and clarify and build the personal, professional, and relational arenas of your life, so you reach your goals.
Life coaching has existed for decades and has grown exponentially in the last ten years. The International Coaching Federation estimates over 70,000 coach practitioners worldwide.2 If this is the first time you're hearing of it, the sheer volume can feel like searching the whole universe for answers.
Just as a human life is broad and deep, so is coaching. At Human Creative Coaching the focus is your full human development, through methods grounded in neuroscience, developmental psychology, performance research, and clinical findings. Topics naturally range across career, romance, friendship, family, health, finances, confidence, loneliness, and more.
Coaches aren't a friend in the stands. They are on the field with you.
What does a life coach do?
A life coach guides individuals toward their personal, professional, and relational goals, and organizations toward their goals, growth, and health.
Even if you don't have goals yet, a great coach digs deep with you: identifies what resonates, builds an action plan, connects you with your key motivators, explores beneficial mindsets, and brings clarity to how your values and beliefs shape every area of life. You may find surprising arenas to be critically important: rest, self-compassion, community, grief, vulnerability, purpose. It sounds unlikely that they matter this much. The science says they do.
A common misconception is that a coach tells you what to do. Coaching is far more about building your personhood from the inside out. A coach lays a foundation for greater clarity on your own intuition and inner wisdom, and strengthens your personal process for decision and action. A life coach is a facilitator, growing you into a stronger, internally healthier person more capable of doing the heavy lifting in your own life, rather than dependent on your coach.
Each coach generally has an area of focus: leadership, business, emotional health, young adults, relationships. A great one helps you bridge the gap between your current circumstances and the life you wish to lead, mind, body, and soul.
Does coaching actually work?
Yes, and not only anecdotally. A meta-analysis of coaching outcome studies found significant positive effects on performance and skills, well-being, coping, work attitudes, and goal-directed self-regulation.3 People who work with a coach here see natural growth in self-advocacy, stress management, empathy, stewarding self, critical decision-making, empowerment, productivity, and efficiency.
What changes with a coach?
A few of the areas of growth clients report:
- Enhanced work performance and clearer personal skills
- Greater ability to operate from your core and organizational values
- Awareness of your leadership impact; better teamwork and conflict resolution
- Ability to adapt to change; developed if-then thinking; improved time management
- Growth in self-stewardship and self-starting
- Balance of physical and emotional health
- A deeper sense of fulfillment, self-worth, freedom, and possibility
- Easier connection with others; confidence in presentations
Closing
Wherever you are in life, dare to live boldly and do life with people who are for you. If you're looking for a coach, start a conversation. There's no cost to the first one.
Questions I hear
What is a life coach?
A trained professional who helps you clarify and reach goals in the personal, professional, and relational arenas of life through counsel, encouragement, and evidence-based growth methods.
How is life coaching different from therapy?
Therapy treats and heals, often working with the past and with clinical conditions. Coaching builds forward: it works with a functioning person on growth, goals, and capacity. Many people benefit from both, and a good coach knows when to refer.
Does a life coach tell you what to do?
No. A coach facilitates. The work strengthens your own judgment, intuition, and process so you become more capable, not more dependent.
Does life coaching actually work?
Research finds significant positive effects on performance, well-being, coping, work attitudes, and self-regulation. Results depend on fit and on the client's willingness to do the work between sessions.
How do I find an effective life coach?
Look for training, a clear method, and a first conversation that leaves you feeling seen rather than sold to. Ask how they measure progress.
Is life coaching worth the cost?
When the fit is right, clients describe compounding returns: decisions made faster, relationships repaired, careers redirected. Treat the first conversation as the test; it should already be useful.
References
- Grant, A. M. (2003). The impact of life coaching on goal attainment, metacognition and mental health. Social Behavior and Personality, 31(3), 253–263. DOI
- International Coaching Federation. (2020). 2020 ICF Global Coaching Study: Executive Summary. ICF. Source
- Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1–18. DOI
This article is written from a coaching perspective and is for general information. It is not psychotherapy, counseling, or medical advice, and it is not a substitute for care from a licensed professional.
Greg Murray · TPRAT certified, TLP Director, TPRAT co-facilitator. Coach to founders, executives, and artists. Writes here about what actually changes a person.
