Life Coaching for Mothers
Supporting You to Create Goals, Life/Work Balance and Confidence
Apr 28, 2008
Life coaching is a targeted approach to tackling life's challenges, whether in career, relationships, or home/work balance, enabling the client to move forward with more confidence and motivation. Life coaching can be a wonderful tool for busy mothers who face particular challenges in achieving a life/work balance.
Definitions of Life Coaching
According to Achievement Specialists, Life Coaching is “both a professional and a personal relationship…designed and managed by the Coach in such a way as to help the client to improve one or many aspects of their lives, independent of the pressures of the past and the present.”
Life coaching is not counselling, and it is not therapy. Instead of looking at the past to understand why the client is in a particular place in life, it looks at the present and explores how to get to an envisioned future.
The Process of Life Coaching
Life coaching is a process whereby the client:
- Identifies their higher goals, values and priorities
- Sets achievable goals
- Accesses their inner motivation to accomplish these – for example, using techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming
- is guided to break down these goals into achievable stepsuncovers hidden beliefs that may be preventing these goals from being achieved, for e.g., that being successful means being selfish
- is guided to question habitual, possibly unhelpful ways of doing things, and to try new, more productive behaviours.
Life Coaching Helps Mothers Find Life/Work balance
As mothers everywhere will tell you, time management is of the essence, whether working outside of the home or not. So it is most convenient that life coaching is done mostly on the phone, and can be fit in around a mother’s busy life.
Many new mothers realise that they do not want to return to a job that is incompatible with a good life/work balance, and use the period of maternity leave to contemplate and plan new career moves, including being self-employed or working from home. This may involve re-training completely. It can all seem confusing and overwhelming – which is where a life coach is a valuable aid in finding one's way through the maze of options and information. Coaching can help mothers to find a way of working without internal conflicts and guilt, and utilise the skills and experience they have gained as mothers, to launch new or revised careers.
Life Coaching Helps Mothers Enjoy MotherhoodThere are many issues that life coaching can help mothers with:
- Increasing confidence in their parenting skills
- Helping them to enjoy and value mothering, an often under-appreciated role in our society
- Helping them to enjoy all their relationships and balance the needs of others, with their own needs
- Re-claiming interests and hobbies, and finding time for them
- Setting goals around exercising and healthy living that enable mothers to function at their best energy levels, and feel good about themselves
- Nurturing relationships with partners and finding shared goals as a family, or finding a partner who supports their goals and dreams
- If the children have ‘left the nest’, finding a new vision for life to move towards.
For a person who spends much of her time attending to the needs of others, having someone on the other end of the line every week that is completely devoted to your interests, can be a huge boost. One mother who is a life coaching client says on 'Coaching Mums' that coaching “helped me rediscover the joys of family life and learn to love the life I live”.
Useful References and Resources
Rapid Personal Growth with a Coach
‘The Life Coaching Handbook' - Curly Martin, Crown House Publishing, 2001
 |
