What Is Coaching?
Making meaningful change
Wellbeing coaching is a form of life coaching where we work towards making meaningful change in any area of your life. We take a holistic view of your health and wellbeing, considering all aspects of yourself, including mental, physical, emotional, spiritual and social.
The great thing about wellbeing coaching is that it's much more than a talking therapy. Depending on your needs, circumstances and preferences, we can incorporate practical exercises and techniques into our work together, such as meditation, physical movement and creative activities.
Coaching can be inspiring, challenging and fun!
The difference between coaching, counselling and mentoring
Generally speaking, counselling and psychotherapy are primarily talking therapies, which tend to look to the past in order to make sense of the present. This can be very helpful in understanding how your habits, beliefs and patterns of behaviour over the years have fed into the person you’ve become today, and how you show up in the world.
Counselling provides a space for you to explore your thoughts and feelings in more depth, and is often used to work through a significant issue or traumatic event.
Coaching tends to have a more forward-focussed approach and is usually centred around goal-setting. We review where you’re at right now, where you’d like to get to and how we can help you get there. Coaching encourages new ways of thinking to help you break out of negative cycles and patterns.
This can apply to any aspect of your life, for example, losing weight, making nutritional changes, finding meaning in your life, dealing with difficult relationships, managing a career change, wanting to be less angry or more confident, or dealing with mental or physical health issues.
Although coaching is primarily a talking therapy, wellbeing coaching can also incorporate practical tools, spiritual practices and coping strategies to help you form new habits, shift your perspective and keep you moving forwards.
Mentoring is similar to coaching, but usually focussed on a very specific topic. A mentor will have specialised experience in a particular field and will provide support, encouragement and feedback to their mentees. Mentoring is most commonly found within a business setting.
How can coaching help you?
Coaching works best when there’s a tangible change you’d like to make in your life. But, as you’ll see from the list of examples below, this can encompass almost anything, and most of us want to effect some form of change in our lives most of the time!
An empowered approach
From my own personal experience, I’ve found that coaching can be inspiring, motivating and empowering. Having a personal ambassador guiding you through life’s struggles can feel incredibly supportive and encouraging. And, the more we’re able to get in touch with our own inner knowing, the more we’re able to understand what we need in order to thrive.
I’ve also found that coaching can work well alongside counselling or therapy. Therapy can help you understand yourself better – your behaviours, patterns, habits and beliefs – and you can then use that knowledge with a coach to find practical solutions to move forward. A coach can bring a new perspective to a situation, suggest tools and techniques to use and help you feel inspired to take positive action.
As a wellbeing coach accredited by the Personalised Care Institute, I share their passion about the importance of coaching for an individual to take agency in the decision-making process about their health and wellbeing. Empowering people to take control of their own wellbeing leads to better health outcomes and, ultimately, fewer strains on public resources.
Really helped me to cope better with life...
“I’ve really enjoyed my one-to-one wellness coaching sessions with the lovely Hannah over the last 6 weeks. I’ve found it’s really helped me to cope better with life and everyday things, and changed my perspective on life. Over the weeks I’ve learnt to reassess my priorities, start with my self-care and have me-time, as well as other time shared equally between loved ones and friends.
I also learnt a lot about my eating habits and have managed to turn it into a fun and easy way of becoming healthier, and that chocolate and crisps aren’t the answer to my problems! I will carry on putting into practice what I’ve learnt and become a happier and healthier person. Thank you so much Hannah.” – Julie
What is coaching not?
Generally speaking, a wellbeing coach doesn’t offer advice. More often than not, you as the client already have the answers you need, so the role of the coach is to ask the right questions to help you tap into this inner wisdom.
A coach is not a medical professional and therefore isn’t qualified to diagnose, prescribe or cure. For more information about this, please read the Medical Disclaimer on the Terms and Conditions page.
Helping you find your flow
If you'd like to get unstuck and feel in control of your life again, check out my coaching packages: