LIFE COACHING
CERTIFICATE IN LIFE COACHING
This course is designed to provide you with a foundation of skills, theoretical understanding and personal development that will allow you to bring coaching into your present job or consult as a coach.
Our approach to life coaching stems from the philosophy, values and skills that our courses in counselling and psychotherapy have estabished over many years.
MEMBERSHIP
The college is a member of the Association for Coaching, students completing the course will be eligible for individual membership of the association.
WHAT IS LIFE COACHING
Life coaching is a modern and powerful approach to supporting and guiding clients who want to create change in their life and make full use of their potential. It supports people in achieving greater life success and personal satisfaction through, for example, taking their career or quality of life, or both, to the next level.
It isn’t counselling and it isn’t just telling someone what to do. It is a dynamic relationship between you and your client that facilitates learning through facing and assessing life and life situations as realistically as possible. People are then more able to see what steps they need to take to make a difference.
Life coaching builds a person’s awareness and responsibility to enhance their quality of relating and performing.
When done well, life coaching helps someone:
- Develop emotional intelligence
- Become more creative
- Maximize motivation
- Enhance leadership in their life
- Expand vision
- Keep the changes in their life creative
Wherever good perception, good listening and good questions are important, life coaching can help. You can build the skills of coaching into your existing job or profession, or you can offer life coaching as a direct service. People from all walks of life and types of work have found the approach of coaching can facilitate change and growth.
HERE ARE SOME EXAMPLES OF WHERE PEOPLE USE LIFE COACHING
- Performance coaching: developing core capacities of setting accurate goals, lateral viewing of the real opportunities and obstacles, assessing poor and beneficial strategies, and identifying keys to motivation and effective implementation.
- Leadership skills coaching: enhancing a person’s ability to bring coaching into their relationship with their own staff or clients. This type of coaching often addresses the coaches own intra- and inter-personal skills.
- Values and vision coaching: giving the client an opportunity to assess and reflect upon their own values and vision. This type of focused work often develops perspective and a discipline of reflection and more lateral viewing that results in significant creative thinking and resolution. As the name suggests, it clarifies values and develops vision, which are the essential qualities of leadership.
- Conflict resolution coaching: addressing conflicts with colleagues, supervisors, friends or family. Whatever the focus of conflict, the coaching process is designed to develop insight into the causes, patterns of functioning and steps for resolution.
Effective coaching should be able to hone in on whatever aspect of development that is being sought. The essence of coaching is helping the individual to develop a learning journey which meets their needs.
WHAT WILL I LEARN?
Life coaching is a powerful skill that enables people to make positive changes in their lives. It is an exciting and dynamic profession that offers practitioners huge potential.
So you too can work as a life coach, we teach you how to:
- Become comfortable with the personal and professional dynamics and atmosphere of being in the “coaching chair”
- Recognize and apply healthy boundaries to look after yourself personally and professionally
- Develop the skills for building rapport and creating a basis for a healthy partnership
- Develop the ability to recognize and work with tools and structures that integrate basic cognitive behavioral skills
- Work respectfully and empathetically
- Understand core principles for creating a healthy life situation
Learning about yourself, how to really listen, how to meet people with openness and availability, observing patterns of behavior and learning to recognize genuine sincerity will likely have a real impact on you and your life. This impact is positive and necessary and will make a difference during delicate or vulnerable experiences with clients
You will also be learning new ideas and theories about people and how they function as well as skills and strategies for helping them, which recognizes that not every one learns in the same way!
Previous graduates have noticed that what they learned has enhanced their performance at work. They have noticed it through being able to work with colleagues and clients more effectively and supportively. They are also more stress resilient and are able to bring more understanding to key relationships.
COURSE STRUCTURE
DURATION
Eight months
FORMAT
The course has 16 training days over eight months. The training days start at 9.00am and run till around 5.30pm.
Some students are funded by employers and therefore prefer to have course time during the week, while other students are self funded and prefer weekend course sessions. We have taken this dilemma into account and have allocated most of the course time to weekends (12 days) and some time to weekdays (4 days).
It also includes five one-to-one coaching sessions.
HOMEWORK
Essay and / or tapes analyzing the life coaching process.
25 hours practical work with clients.
ASSESSMENT
Involves a range of case studies, essays / tapes to demonstrate
life coaching principles and skills.
QUALIFICATION
Certificate in life coaching (from the Scottish Institute of Life Coaching)
SUMMARY OF THE COURSE SYLLABUS
The aims of the course are to help you:
- Develop healthy boundaries, considering empathy versus sympathy
- Understand the principles of emotional intelligence
- Learn the skills of listening and questioning: tools of coaching
- Use the structure of a critical path analysis (CPA) in your work (this is a tool we use to bring realism and responsibility to the client’s approach to problem solving)
- Learn how to set up clear and realistic goals and overcome obstacles
- Work with stress
- Understand the psychology and steps to “can do”
- Focus a person’s imagination so it works for them and not against them
- Understand key dynamics that govern life interactions
CLICK ON A COURSE FOR MORE DETAILS
