Lifecoaching (or personal coaching) is fairly popular these days. Many people have asked me what I think of life coaching, so Ill share my thoughts on this subject.

A life coach is someone you hire to help assist you with your personal development, especially in the area of setting and achieving specific goals. Typically this involves paying a few hundred dollars per month to speak with a trained coach by phone for 30-60 minutes per week. Pricing and service offerings vary tremendously. Your life coach may share advice, offer guidance, help you make plans, and hold you accountable for taking action. You can hire a health coach to help you with health and fitness goals (like a virtual personal trainer). You can hire a businesscoach to help you build or grow a business. You can hire a productivity coach to help you get organized and increase your productivity. Every life coaching situation is unique, so theres a great deal of flexibility here.

At two different times in my life, I hired a life coach, each time for about six months. The first time was in 1993 while I was in college. The second time was around 2001 when I was running my games business.

When I hiredmy first lifecoach, I thought it might be useful in helping to increase my productivity. This coaching program began with avery thoroughpersonality assessment test, so ostensibly the coach could use this info to make the coaching more personal.

My results with this particular coach were mixed.I hired him during the time I was going through college in 3 semesters, and I liked that he helped hold me accountable to getting certain things done. Unfortunatelyhe decided to usemy test resultstotry toimprove what he considered some of my personality flaws, so he would sometimes coachme to work on his goals for me instead ofmy goals for me. Today this practice is largely considered unethical by the coaching community. Most coaches now know they must work on their clients goals, not their own goals for their clients. Some coach training and referralorganizations have written standards of ethics to clarify this.

This particular coach wasnt a great fit for me. He wanted to mold me into a more well-rounded person, whereas my goal was to become sharper in a few key areas. For example, he determined that I needed toimprove my social skills, so he gave me assignments like, Smile at 10 people today. As a computer science and math major, I thought that was a stupid assignment, so I didnt doit. I think his heart was in the right place, and later in life Idid put some serious effort intodeveloping my social skills, but as a coach it really wasnthis place to set goals for me. This caused me to lose respect for him, and it made our relationship less productive than it could have been.

This coach worked as part of a larger coaching operation, and they had a very generous money-back guarantee. I paid about $900 for six months of weekly 30-minute phone coaching sessions. The guarantee was such that if you werent satisfied for any reason, you could get a full refund on your entiresix months of coaching. That guaranteewas one of the reasons I signed up; I figured I had nothing to lose. In the end I did ask forthe refund, and to their credit they promptlyrefunded the full fee. I was excited about the coaching at first, and even at the halfway point it seemed like it was going somewhere,but in the end I realized it didnt meet my expectations. I felt bad asking for the refund, but I would have felt worse if Ididnt. I did get some value from the six months of coaching, but it wasnt worth $900 to me, and the terms of the guarantee made it clear that I should have been delighted, not disappointed. On a scale of 1-10, Id rate this coaching experience a 4.

The second time I hired a coach was during a period when my games business, Dexterity Software, was growing nicely. I thought it would be good to have a coach to help me sort through all the projects on my plate and tosolve some tricky problems.

This time I hired an independent coach instead of going with a larger organization. Most independent coaches offer a free session (try before you buy), so you can decide if theyre a good fit for you. I tried 3-4 different coaches and picked the one I liked best. I paid $70 per 60-minute weekly phone call. I also had the opportunity to do simple follow-up emails with this coach throughout the week.

I liked this coach, and I was happy with the service he provided. He was an experienced programmer like me, but he was also a very right-brained person. He taught me some creative problem-solving and visualizationtechniques. He was also very intuitive, so he would oftendetect the unspoken problems behind my spoken words. This made our conversations very efficient because he was able to get to the core issues quickly. We worked mostly on business challenges but also on some personal goals. My sales increased during this coaching period, so that was certainly nice.

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Life Coaching - Steve Pavlina