What do you think of when you hear the word coach?

Do you think of the coach of your favorite team?

A personal trainer?

Someone an athlete hires to train for the Olympics?

That is what most people think of when they hear the word ‘coach’ They forget that you can have a coach for the most important thing in the whole world… your life! aka a life coach

In order understand what a life coach is, we need to know what exactly being a life coach means.

The definition of life coach according to chat GPT is a professional who helps individuals identify and achieve personal or professional goals, overcome obstacles and create action plans to maximize their potential. They focus on the future, setting goals, and achieving specific outcomes.

I first became acquainted with coaching as a life endeavor and profession through the book “You’re a Badass” by Jen Sincero. If you haven’t read any of her books, you should. They’re great!

I wanted to share a little bit about what she teaches about coaching.

To summarize, her main points about coaching are…

• The Value of outside perspective: Coaches help provide objective insights that help us identify and overcome subconscious mind blocks that are holding us back from our fullest potential.
• Accountability: Just like an athletic coach, having accountability in life can greatly accelerate your personal progress.
• Personal investment: As we all know as professionals in our industries, when we pay for something, we take it more seriously therefor garnering better results.
• Accelerated Growth: Why spend your life figuring things out on your own when you can invest in yourself, hire a coach, and figure it out more quickly with someone cheering along side you?
• Expansion! Coaches help you expand and realize your fullest potential!

When talking about coaching, I find that it is important to make the distinction between coaching and therapy.

Because for coaching to be effective, the client has to be functioning well, want to grow, improve mindset, and create change in their lives.

A therapist is a licensed mental health professional trained to assess, diagnose, and treat mental health disorders and emotional issues through evidence-based practices.

Coaches are not qualified to help with “clinical issues”, mental health diagnosis, or emotional crises.

The way I like to explain it to people is that therapy looks to address and heal the past while coaching helps you remain in the present and build a more epic future!

After about 10 years of my own on and off therapy, overcoming an eating disorder, random traumas, and other issues, I was finally able to hire a coach to help me begin to find the tools to move forward and really improve my mindset and learn to maximize my potential. I needed to address a lot of those issues via therapy before I was ready to move forward with coaching.

I am also a recreational therapist.

This adds a little extra pizzaz to my qualifications because it helps me remain more aligned to my core values as a person and as a professional

Since most people don’t know what a recreational therapist is, let me share…

A Recreational Therapist is a licensed or certified healthcare professional who uses recreational and leisure activities as therapeutic interventions to improve an individuals physical, mental, emotional and social well-being. These activities are designed to help patients recover or adapt after illness, injury, disability, trauma, etc and promote overall quality of life. It is largely activity based. Something I am very, very passionate about.

Now that we’ve defined everything, I’d like to share what my niche is.

I am a life coach for moms who seek to create a balance between who they were, who they are and who they want to become. I help them discover tools to overcome their overwhelm, find more adventure, and healthy coping skills, and, as I mentioned earlier, maximize their potential.

When we become moms, it changes just about everything. It changes our rolls in society, in our families, our friend group… It changes our brain chemistry, hormones, bodies, sleep patterns, hair, foot size, ability to cope, athletic abilities… really just the very essence of who we are.

Motherhood can be overwhelming, it can be stressful, and comes at all of us differently. It can feel impossible to try to rediscover who we are in the heat of motherhood

I’ve seen this in my self and in the lives of countless other women.

When I first started my coaching business, I wanted to be an adventure coach. I wanted to help moms rediscover or simply discover their sense of adventure. Then I switched to just motherhood overwhelm.

Then I realized that I could combine all of it while utilizing both my recreational therapy and coaching knowledge to better serve my clients.

Which is why I have staked a claim in general motherhood coaching with an emphasis in helping moms piece together all of herself while helping her find healthy ways to experience leisure and recreation that best suit her lifestyle and circumstances.

Because leisure and recreation looks and feels different to everyone, it has been a beautiful challenge for me to help women I have worked with. For one mom what she needed was the confidence to buy more colorful clothes and go to community playdates. For another it was finding time for photography and for another it was journaling.

Moms who I have worked with have shared that I helped them more than therapy did. I am not saying don’t’ go to therapy if you need it. I did therapy for years and I know how positive it can be! That being said, I feel that at some point we outgrow therapy and need coaching to continue moving forward.

Are you ready to maximize your potential?

Create a better now?

And create more time for yourself to thrive?

Schedule your coaching call using this LINK

In the words of Jen Sincero

“if you want to live a life you’ve never lived, you have to do things you’ve never done. And hiring a coach is one of the smartest, most efficient ways to reach your goals.”