Episode 2: “I don’t know what a life coach is”

In this episode, life coach Stephanie Finigan will walk you through the fundamentals of what life coaching actually is, how and when it makes sense to hire a coach, and what the limits of coaching is as well. You will hear how Stephanie found coaching herself, and walk away with a solid understanding of the purpose and usefulness of life coaching.

Welcome to the first full episode of the I'm the Problem podcast with Coach Stephanie. I'm Stephanie Finigan, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about the problem of not even knowing what a life coach is or when it might make sense for you to hire one.

I thought I would start the show off with this episode. I mean, it's sort of a logical episode to start with, laying out what life coaching is. But more so I wanted to do it because I'm frustrated by the fact that life coaching is still on the fringe. It's still something that is not fully understood. It's definitely not fully embraced. It's not mainstream. And it's something that I myself had been really skeptical and pretty judgmental about until I got involved. So part of this is wanting to sort of share what life coaching is from my own experience, not only as a coach, but as someone who has been coached and hired and still hires coaches, but also because I just think it's something that could be helpful for so many people if people just understood what a life coach even is and what it means.

At the end of the day we walk around with one brain that literally decides the course of our entire lives and we spend very little time thinking about what the hell's going on there. And that's what life coaching is. It's really a way for you to kind of understand what the hell is going on in your brain. So anyway I am excited about this and I do think it's a problem, people not knowing what life coaching is. And it certainly was a problem for me. And when I solved the problem by actually starting to get coached and understand coaching, the trajectory of my career and my life, frankly, changed.

So here we go. I'm going to start by telling you a little bit about my own story and how I got involved with life coaching as a client before I ever, you know, even considered becoming a coach. And then I'm going to walk through at a high level just some important things to know about coaching, coaching as compared to therapy and other modalities of wellness and talking about some things to be on the lookout for if you are interested in investing in a coach yourself. So let's dive in.

At the outset, it's good to know, I think it's helpful to know about me that I am a pretty practical person. So the idea that I would ever hire a coach, let alone become a life coach, is something that my past self would never have believed and would have honestly just rolled her eyes at and just no, right? “Life coach” was like a punchline. It was a joke. It was something that Kardashians had and not me. And it just did not feel like it was something that was ever going to be in my own orbit. And it never really occurred to me to hire a coach or really look deeply into what life coaching even is.

However, I say that and at the same time, I think a part of me was always more curious about coaching that I realized I just didn't know what it was. So I didn't realize that's what I was curious about. And this might be the case for you too. I was always a fan of personal development. I liked reading books by, I loved Stephen Covey and Tony Robbins and kind of all of like the real throwback thinkers and coaches.

But I've gone through my own ups and downs in life as we all have. And I personally have wrestled with depression on and off for many, many years. And I found personal development to be actually really helpful during some of those down times way back when and up through today. So when I found my way to life coaching specifically, it was during one of those times when I was depressed. And we'll talk about depression and other diagnoses in terms of coaching in a moment, but just know that's the state that I was in. And I was feeling really lost. And this was in my mid-30s, I remember sitting on my bed in my little apartment googling holistic health coaches. I don't cook myself at all. I never have. And I was trying to figure out how I could eat healthier by like never boiling water, which was not possible. But I was trying to like figure out how can I be healthier with the constraints or kind of the things I had in my life, which was limited budget, limited time, and frankly, limited interest in learning a skill like cooking organic whatevers. So as I was Googling all of this, I found my way to some life coaches. And at this time, most of them were writing on blogs or their own websites. A couple had podcasts. This was still kind of the early, early days of podcasting. And that's how it started for me.

I began following a few of those people whose messaging and personalities, at least from what I could tell online, were people that resonated with me. And to be clear, there were a lot of people that didn't resonate with me, right? Like there were a lot that were very woo-woo and spiritual and was not the route that I wanted to go. I wanted more like, give me some actions, give me some things to do. How do I measure my results? I found coaches that were resonating with me, people that had kind of a personality that was something I could relate to. And through them, I kept being led to other people. And eventually, I found a few that I liked enough to start buying their e-books or buying their courses or their group projects. And I found that I was able to connect with them. And I found that I liked enough to start buying their e-books or buying their courses or their group programs and eventually one-on-one programs. And that's how I came to coaching. It just was kind of a slow burn, I think, as it is for a lot of people. But once I found it, I just realized like, oh, this stuff works.

Caveat here, I not only found and read or followed or listened to these people, I applied what they were teaching. And that's the key. It doesn't really work through osmosis. You do need to change your thinking, but you have to actually practice, like put into practice the things that coaches are guiding you to do. And I did that. And when I did that, I saw results and I got really excited and I wanted more and eventually went on to decide that I wanted to be certified myself as a coach.

And so in 2021, I got certified and I launched my own coaching practice. I am so grateful to coaching for everything I've gotten from it, but I also can totally understand when people are skeptical about life coaching because I was too. I get it. It seems like kind of garbage or it feels like every third person on the internet is calling themselves a life coach without any qualifications or without any reason to, and I will just say I get that, whatever the skepticism is that you might have.

So with that, let's kind of get down to some basics here. What exactly does a life coach do? If you ask 10 different coaches what life coaching is, you're probably going to get 10 different answers. And I think that that's kind of the beauty of all of this is that if and when you decide you want to coach, and my personal feeling is that everybody should have a coach, just like everybody should have a dentist to deal with your teeth. Everybody should have a coach to deal with what's going on in your brain. But if you ask 10 different coaches, you're going to get 10 different answers. I like to think of life coaching as this thing that sort of falls in that gray area between going to therapy and asking your friends what you should do. You know you have those problems or challenges. It just doesn't seem like it needs a therapist's attention or it warrants that, but that it also seems too complicated or challenging or even too vague or just has been going on too long for you to bring to your friends. That's where a coach can come in.

Another way to think about when a coach can be useful is, and if we think about it in terms of therapy, which is a reference I like using since it's closely related in terms of what we all typically understand as methods of helping when you've got a challenge with your thinking and a challenge is going on mentally. Another way I think about this is that therapy is very diagnostic, right? It focuses on identifying with what's happening to you now as a result of your past. Coaching, on the other hand, focuses on where you are now and where you want to go in the future and what's preventing you from being there already. So therapy tends to be past focused and coaching tends to be future focused.

I will say this as an interjection. I not only have coaches and have been coached for a long time, I have also been in and out of therapy for a very long time. I have a therapist I love, and so this is by no means a flight on therapy, and nor is it saying you have to do one or the other. If you have the financial means and the time to do both, and you're at a moment in your life where you need both, that can be very helpful.

And still another way to think about all this, you can think about it like you've got an area of your life you wanna work on because you are currently underperforming in, or you're not getting the results that you want, or it's something that is not functioning fully well for you. A therapist will take you from that dysfunctional place to a functional place, or an underperforming place to a performing place. Whereas a coach will take you from functioning to high functioning or performing to high performing or good to great. Everything's okay, but I want to level up. Like things are fine, but I want things to be amazing. That's where a coach can get involved.

So to make it super clear, coaches are not licensed to diagnose anything. So if you're looking for support for a specific diagnosis or you're looking to be diagnosed, I mentioned depression earlier. If you're wrestling with depression as a diagnosis, it's not something that you're gonna go to your coach to help you with, that is for therapy. If you have big T trauma, that is for therapy. You're gonna wanna seek out a therapist, not a coach in those situations because coaches are not licensed to do that unless they have a license from something other than coaching. That's where your research and all of this needs to come in. You need to understand who you're talking to and what their qualifications are. A good coach will let you know upfront and throughout your time together what topics are appropriate for coaching and which topics are beyond the coach's ability to support you. And that's really key, right? They should let you know right away up front in your initial conversation with them. If you're looking for something that is outside their scope and qualifications, they should tell you that right away.

And I like to think of coaching as “coaching helps to remove unnecessary suffering”. There is suffering that is necessary. If you're going through a big T trauma, that is something that you're going to want to have feelings about. There's times in life where it's totally appropriate to feel feelings related to suffering, and that is completely healthy and that is something you should be doing. And coaching will not be able to take that away from you, right? It won't be able to relieve that level of suffering. But what coaching will do is it will be able to relieve the unnecessary suffering, just the mind noise, the chatter, the roadblocks that we put in our own ways. That's what coaching will be able to help you get clear on.

Okay, so that's kind of an outline about what coaching is and isn't able to do for you. There are lots of different types of coaches and that's the next thing I want to touch on, which is just there's as many types of coaching styles and techniques as there are coaches, honestly, ranging from, as I've mentioned, super woo to science-based coaches and every type in between. Some coaches focus more on breath work than others. Some will ask you for your astrological sign or your enneagram type, while others think all of that's crap, right? Some will focus on areas like your professional life while others will coach you more broadly. Some will be really prescriptive about the actions and the steps that you need to take in pursuit of a goal and the layout of roadmap. Others will offer more of a blank slate approach and sort of co-create all of that with you. Others still will not focus on actions at all. They'll only focus on your thoughts, your feelings, how it feels in your body to do something and they will leave the action part up to you. So really, there's a whole variety of coaches out there. It really just depends on what resonates with you. That's what's going to determine what's going to work the best.

The type of coaching that I practice is called causal coaching, and it's really focused on your mindset as the root cause of all of your results. Meaning we look for the thoughts that you're thinking that are ultimately creating the results you have in your life. And if you don't like those results, we do the work together to change your thinking in order to then change the results that you're getting. That's not to say that we don't develop strategies or tools or actions for you to take, we do. That's a big part of the work that we do together. But the biggest emphasis we have when you're working with me or another coach that is practicing causal coaching is that the emphasis is on how to manage your mind to get you to where you want to go. So when I chose to get certified, I decided to become certified in this type of coaching because it's what my first coaches used and I found it to be really effective for my own life. And there were a lot of areas that I wanted to change in my own life and this was the type of coaching that was not only effective, but frankly, sustainable. And that's really the goal. The goal should not be that you're making changes for the time that you're working with your coach. The goal is that you are developing tools and practices to be able to take forward with you long after you have finished working with your coach.

The other reason why I really like this type of coaching was because it made sense to me once I started to understand it all and I was able to then apply it to all sorts of areas of my life. So primarily when I first started working with a coach, I was focused on money mindset and breaking some bad money habits that I had and creating new good money habits and making more money and saving and not overspending, all of that sort of stuff. And while I was focused on money coaching, all the stuff I was learning were skills I was able to then apply to different areas of my life, my personal relationships, my friendships, some stuff professionally. I've done more of that later. I saw kind of the ripple effect of the work.

Okay, so let's look at really the specifics here. Why would I make the investment in a coach? So you can come to a coach for any topic you're dealing with in your life, hence the broad title of life coach. But some of the most common examples of topics that people come to a life coach for include relationships. So people thinking like, I'm not sure I want to stay with my partner. I can't stop yelling at my kids. My parents are aging and I don't know how to handle them. I don't know how to make new friends. I don't know where I find new friends as an adult. I've outgrown my friends and I'm not sure what to do. Any element of relationships is something that you can get coaching on and that is a huge area for coaches to support people in.

Another is career, specifically career transition. So I want to make a move to a new industry or to a new role, but it feels too risky, or I feel like I'm too old to do that, or it feels like it's going to be too hard, or I want to start my own business, but I don't know where to begin. I have a passion. I'm not sure if it can be a career or not. Any one of those things is a great topic to bring to a coach.

Money is another one. I mentioned this is how I first started working with a coach was on money issues. I love coaching on money. Money issues can be anything from I'm struggling with debt and I can't get out of it. I have so much anxiety about money all the time. I secretly overspend. I am scared to overspend, so I don't spend on anything. I feel like there's never enough money. People that are in scarcity mindset all the time. I want to find ways to earn more or spend less. All of those things are really great topics to bring to a coaching call because money is such a mental game and it's amazing the transformations that can take place regarding money when people start to get coaching.

Health is another area that you can come to a life coach for support with. And health is a great area and super interesting because a lot of people think like I need to go to a running coach or I need to go to some sort of specific type of coach if you want to hire a coach for health. The reality is, yeah, if you want to improve your run form, then go to a running coach, right? If you want to improve how you are working out at the gym or increasing muscle mass or whatever, yeah, get a personal trainer. But if you've got health goals or if you've got health challenges and you haven't tried mindset work for it, you haven't tried working with a mindset coach, it's really, really helpful to do that. It can be really transformative. So some examples are like, I can't meet my weight loss goals. For people that have tried sort of all the diets and all the things, but you haven't actually done the thought work around it, or you have but maybe it hasn't stuck, that's a great area to come to a coach with. I have a new diagnosis and I don't know what to do. So if you are in the throes of that or someone I love has a diagnosis and I'm not sure what to do, that's another area to come to a coach to get some support on. I have old patterns I can't break. I want to quit sugar or I want to give up drinking caffeine or whatnot and you're struggling with that. Perfect area for a coach. I want to start a new routine but it's too hard. I want to start working out but early in the morning and I can't get out of bed. That one does come up a lot and I love coaching on that topic because it's not really about the number of hours that you're in bed. Anything like that you can come to a coach with.

Stress management is another one. There's never enough time. I can't stop snapping at my kids. I don't know how to juggle my obligations and my personal goals. I can't get everything done. There's not enough hours in the day. All of that stress management and that ties right in with time management which is another one right? I just gave a couple of examples there but something else like I have no system to keep help me stay organized. My calendar is a mess. I don't know how to use my calendar. My to-do list is epic. Anything that's causing stress or tension when it comes to time management or organization is a great topic for a coach as well as just general stress management. Like I am stressed out all the time. Great. Bring that to a coach. Perfect topic.

And then finally, another one that's a little bit bigger, but I love this is which is the sense of drive or purpose, right? So this is this idea of like, yes, things are fine, but I know they could be so much better. I just don't know what to do or like, I don't know what I want, but it's not this or I do know my purpose, but I'm friggin terrified to make changes in my life to get there. It doesn't seem realistic. It seems irresponsible. I'm too old. I have too many other obligations. All that shit that is perfect to bring to a coaching session. I actually really love coaching on sense of drive and purpose. I think that's just such a meaty area for people to dive into with a coach. So given how vast the coaching space is and depending on what you want coaching on, there is a coach out there that can help. I promise you that.

Okay, and there's one other thing that's important to know, which is the fact that life coaching is not a regulated industry. So coaches do not go through the same standardized certification process or meet any shared group of requirements in order to practice. So as a result, coaches really vary in training, in skill, in price, and in their ability to help you. There are some coaches with no formal certifications who are amazing. I have a coach right now who is not formally certified by anyone or any organization, and she's amazing. So the best way, and I've said this a couple times now, but that's why the best way to find a coach who will be a good fit for you is to do your research and also ask yourself if a coach you're considering is someone you align with and someone who's demonstrated that you can learn something new from them. That is the key. Are you going to be able to learn something from this coach? And if so, that's a coach you might want to test out. Most of the time, how much benefit you will get from working with a coach comes down to how much you like working with that person. If you align with their message, their vibe, and how much work you're willing to do on your end. And this is really key. Even the best coach in the world cannot work a miracle if you're not open to letting one happen.

What I can say is that from the coaching that I do, causal coaching, since we're focused on your mindset there, the specific areas or challenges that you want to address are less important than your desire to make a change. If you want to make a change and you work with a coach, you will find something valuable there. And I'm not saying don't go into coaching with a healthy dose of skepticism, ask all the questions, challenge your coach, go for that. That's how you're gonna know if you're working with the right person, right? But at the end of the day, you have to be willing to put in the work and you have to be willing to be open to change happening. If you are willing to do those things, you will find success.

So that's what I've got for you today, guys. I hope this episode was helpful for you in solving the problem of not understanding what a life coach is and or not knowing if it's time for you to hire one. If you have any questions or feedback on this, I would love to hear from you. You can shoot me an email at info at makeyourpivot.co. Any questions, anything that you wanna comment on, let me know. Otherwise, thanks again for listening, and I will catch you guys on the next episode.