Life Coaching Methods Term Paper

Life coaching is an innovative field that aims to motivate the individual to find answers to their own questions and solutions to the major obstacles that might hinder their ability to achieve their life goals. Traditional life coaching focuses on this idea that the individual should be guided to their own solutions. Hybrid strategies have been born out of life coaching methods with other professional fields, like business and nutrition. New developments in technology also provide future benefits in combining these two techniques.

Branching out from psychotherapy, life coaching provides a way to motivate people to make better decisions to empower themselves to create their own environment that increases their overall well being. Traditional life coaching focuses on a life coach who prods, questions, and guides the individual to find the motivation to solve their own problems. This essentially empowers the individual to solve their own problems. The recent discourse shows that these more traditional techniques are being combined with other types of genres to create truly hybrid strategies. Further combining traditional techniques with other hybrid alternatives will continue to provide a multi-faceted approach to individual motivation and guidance to reach very specific goals that cross a number of boundaries.

Literature Review

Life coaching is all about helping the individual reach some goal or objective, not matter what genre that goal may fall under. Essentially, "coaching is about helping someone to achieve their own personal goals that they themselves set" (Dunbar, 2010, p 7). Traditional life coaching itself was originally a hybrid genre that was born out of several "intellectual traditions of sports psychology, organizational scholarship, business management, motivational theories, decision science, and other fields to help motivate and support their clients" (Biswas-Diener, 2009, p 545). It focuses on using questioning as a way for coaches to help guide their coaches towards their own answers and solutions.As such, "coaching involves asking questions to help the coachee realize previously un-thought of solutions. Most coaches do not attempt to provide the answers for a coachee" (Dunbar, 2010, p 7). The individual must find their own path to their best generated solution. This is, of course, done with the help with of a licensed profession who knows best how to deal with the unique problems of individuals. There is an "importance of heavily client-directed sessions in which the client sets the agenda and defines the desirable outcomes" (Biswas-Diener, 2009, p 546).

On the other hand, hybrid coaching combines elements from a wide variety of other genres. Life coaching strategies have evolved into a hybrid set of practices within the larger field (Dunbar, 2010). A wide variety of industries and professional genres can benefit from the techniques and strategies found within life coaching philosophies. Hybrid life coaching techniques provide a connection to other fields, like nutrition. Most often, hybrid strategies focus on finding and exploiting a common synergy between the different genres, "which means combining multiple strategies together that become force multipliers of….....