A life coach is someone who aims to help and empower others to make, meet and exceed personal and professional goals. This can include excelling in the workplace, becoming happy and fulfilled at home, exploring your potential and achieving ambitions.

By harnessing techniques based on core psychological principles and intuition, life coaches provide clients with the tools to confidently face difficult situations and push past emotional barriers.

At the heart of it all lies the idea that clients must be given the power to help themselves. Offering advice, opinions and judgements would undermine some of the basic principles behind life coaching, which include:

A) Subjectivity: we all have different perspectives of the world – no one perspective is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, but some perspectives are restrictive and can stop a person becoming who they want to be.

B) Empowerment: it is within everyone’s capability to adjust the limits of their own perspective. With the help of life coaching, anyone can learn to open their mind if they wish.

C) Guidance: there is a difference between an instructor and a guide. An instructor shows a person exactly what to do, whereas a guide provides the tools and support a person needs to do something for themselves. A life coach is a guide, not an instructor.