But before you recruit a professional, there’s a catch: They can be expensive. If you’re contemplating hiring a life coach, you may be wondering whether professional help is worth investing your time and money.

To help you weigh your options and decide for yourself whether guidance from a professional will help you thrive and achieve your long-term goals, consider these factors.

Factor in time and pricing. You have the option of working with a life coach continuously or for a limited number of sessions, depending on your needs and budget. According to the website CostHelper.com, which offers information on pricing for various services and products, consumers spend an average of $75 to $200 per hour for a life coach.

Martin Grohman, a business owner in Portland, Maine, and a state representative, hired two life coaches. “Particularly with the second one, Emily Chipman, I felt like I got a good result. It was $2,300 for 10 telephone sessions with assignments in between,” Grohman says. “She coached me on what was standing in my way – mentally – in a decision running for higher office, and now I’m doing it.”

Know what to expect from each session. You can anticipate helpful advice and a sounding board for the ideas you are thinking about executing. And if you think the life coach you work with is smart and intuitive, you may feel you’re getting a lot for your money.

They are popular professions worldwide and show no signs of decreasing. Certification programs abound, but as you will read, this is an unregulated field. Certification is not required. Testing and licensing do not exist.

Unlike people trained as psychologists or counselors who are licensed, life coaches are not therapists. A life coach could have no, some, or extensive education in almost any field and still hold the title of “life coach.”

Knowing this, why do people hire a life coach? Education does not equal wisdom, but experience often does in the minds of many.

A life coach can help a person to identify strengths, develop them, and identify personal and professional goals. Their role is to assist the coachee throughout the change process. As you will discover, this happens in several ways.

A mentor’s focus is partly on compatibility with the mentee. The mentor and mentee might engage with each other through social or professional events to determine ‘fit.’

Most of the session involves the coach listening, and then asking powerfully focused questions. Moore and colleagues offer several examples. Among them are:

• What was your best experience with your goals in the past week?
• What percentage of achievement did you reach for this goal?
• What contributed to this level of success?
• What did you learn from the experience?
• When you think about this goal, what feelings does it stimulate, and what needs does it meet?

It might seem that the concept of turning to a coach outside of a sporting context is something that many people would shy away from — but the more you think about it, the more you may realize that people have been turning to friends and family for help and guidance for years. Life coaching is just a professional extension of that help.  

Most of us turn to a friend who we consider to be ‘wise’ when it comes to certain circumstances such as making key decisions or overcoming problems. But our friends may not always have the answers or may not be sufficiently objective about a situation to give decent advice. This is where life coaching has role to play, by helping people see their life from a different perspective and giving them the confidence to move forward.

Life coaching is a form of counselling…to help people solve their problems and achieve ambitions.

Steve Mitchall

Life coaching is a form of counselling which uses a series of individual sessions — which are sometimes carried out over a telephone or even via e-mails, as well as through face-to-face sessions — to help people solve their problems and achieve ambitions. It draws from a number of disciplines, including sociology, psychology, and numerous forms of counselling.

While life coaching is frequently associated with the business world, there are also coaches who deal with individuals and their personal lives by helping them to explore the underlying causes of their problems as well as helping to find routes to success. This more personal kind of life coaching is frequently done face-to-face.  

Back in my Special Forces days, we had call signs and code words too. We actually made one up of maverick. When someone called maverick everyone else would stop and let that person go into the building to clear it themselves. It was an inside joke to make fun of those teammates that got too over eager to do it all themselves.

In real life, you don’t want to be a maverick. There are many practical lessons to be learned from the maverick example…Here are two:

1. No matter how good you are (and Green Berets are the best of the best), it’s hard to succeed all by yourself. As a matter of fact 1 is the WORST number in life and business. One of anything is a recipe for disaster: one main source of
   revenue, one big customer, one supplier. One anything means if that one thing were to disappear you could out of business FAST!

There is always a “band of outlaws” (competitors, politicians, etc.) out to ambush you. When you go maverick, there is no one to have your back, to check your blindside. This is true both in life and business. Plus, it gets awful lonely and tough when you operate by yourself. In Special Ops, we had Ranger buddies. Your Ranger Buddy was there to keep you going ,to make sure you keep going when you wanted to quit.

Don’t be a maverick when it comes to your life and business. Diversify. Don’t depend on just one thing or yourself. Find yourself a mastermind, a coach, a community of people to collaborate with.

Our minds are working with lots of new and unfamiliar information.  We are considering our own mortality in ways we perhaps never have. Our basic foundations have experienced a seismic tremor that has reverberated through every facet and field of our extended lives. We can no longer simply walk out of the house whenever we want, as often as we want. Pasta and flour have become like gold-dust in some areas, as everyone stockpiles and bakes like their lives depended on it – perhaps they do?

Now that you have a list of your present ‘life areas’, here are a few questions you can consider for each area in turn:

• How do I feel when I think about this area?
• How would I like to feel about this area?
• What is important to me in this area?
• How happy am I with the amount of time I spend on what’s important to me?
• How has lockdown made me think differently about this area of my life?
• When you look at all the areas in your life you have noted, what is there that is missing which is important for you? Note down anything that’s missing and consider the previous questions for each of the missing things you noted.