Andrea Molloy - Aspirations: 8 easy steps to coach yourself to success

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams, live the life youve imagined.

THOREAU

Do you wake up every single morning brimming with excitement and eager to start the new day? Are you as successful as you could be with your relationships, lifestyle, career and finances? Is your life balanced, with plenty of time to achieve all your dreams? Do you have a clear plan for your life for the next week, month or year?

If you answer no to any of these questions then life coaching can and will help you. Anyone who wants to improve their performance or reach a goal faster can benefit from coaching.

This eight-step guide will inspire and empower you to make positive changes in your life so you can reach your dreams, goals and aspirations. With practical tips and action tasks you can learn how to recharge and revitalise your passion for life.

Olympic athletes have coaches to help them train and reach their fitness goals. Can you imagine how much more efficient, productive and motivated you would be if you also had your own personal coach?

A life coach facilitates, encourages and motivates you to set and reach effective personal or professional goals for a more successful life the life you want!

Life coaching is often confused with therapy and counselling. These disciplines generally focus on recovery, and deal with the past, while life coaching is wholly solution-based and is concerned with your future development. In short, life coaching is a facilitated process that looks at your current reality and your future goals, and closes the gap between the two by helping you identify options and the way forward.

The concept of the professional, trained life coach originated in the USA, evolving in response to a need. In the mid-1980s therapists began to realise that many clients needed a wider view of their lives to focus on and coaching was soon developed, led by people like Laura Berman Fortgang and Thomas Leonard. Life coaching has existed formally since the 1992 inception of the professional body, the International Coach Federation, which boasts more than 5000 members worldwide. Leading international life coaches today include Cheryl Richardson and Fiona Harrold.

A life coach works with you to define your ideal life and identify the steps you need to take to get there a personalised action plan for your own success in life.

Just as a personal trainer works on your body, identifying areas of improvement, devising a plan of action and motivating you to keep on track with your fitness goals, a life coach works on the rest of your life.

Throughout your coaching sessions, your coach will guide you as you resolve challenges, consider options, adopt creative solutions, maintain focus, implement strategies and evaluate your outcomes.

Personal coaching sessions are held weekly, mostly by phone, for up to an hour, plus email support. Life coaching, like fitness training, is recommended over a three-month period as this is a short enough time frame to keep focused and motivated, but long enough to achieve goals and complete specific projects.

As a client you choose the areas you want to work on, partnering one-on-one with a coach. Many clients use the coaching process to:

• manage life more effectively
• improve health and reduce stress levels
• overcome self-limiting beliefs
• find a clear direction for life
• develop confidence and a positive attitude
• improve communication and relationships
• realise their own potential and live their best life
• achieve their goals and dreams.

Coaching covers every area of your life, including career, education, finances, health, fitness, family, relationships, leisure and recreation.

Trained and accredited life coaches are experienced in advanced listening skills, effective questioning techniques and coaching concepts, in order to facilitate your development on an individual basis. Unlike working with a mentor who has been there, done that, a coachs own personal experience of a situation is irrelevant. The coaching process is fully focused on you as a client, enabling you to achieve results in your life that suit you.

Ultimately you are responsible for your own life and your own future. Step by step throughout this book I will encourage and support you to make individual positive changes, which will pave the way for a better life.

Each of the steps in this book can be dipped into and read independently, however it works best as an eight-step programme enabling you to develop your personal awareness. You may consider reading a step a week, and completing the tasks that will uncover your ideal life and assist you in reaching your goals, or you could read the entire book and then revisit the steps that are of highest importance to you.

In Step 1, I will show you how to aspire to your dreams through effective goal-setting. I will explain why goal-setting is the important first step in your success plan. This is your big chance to design your own life!

In Step 2, I will facilitate your defining of your own personal values as a foundation for your life. Your values, coupled with your goals from Step 1, will provide a personal success blueprint to work with throughout this book.

In Step 3, I will introduce the concept of self-care and ask you to think long and hard about how you are looking after yourself. I will challenge you to actively improve your healthy habits and self-care. Adopting this concept will enable you to set yourself up for success and the achievement of your goals.

Step 4