An interview with a Life Coach – Christine Livingston

Posted by Ben Lumley on Mar 1, 2010 in Dealing with Problems, Goals, Success, Think Differently | 58 comments

I have recently been thinking about my direction in life. I know that I want to help people, as I already do with young people, so I’ve been thinking about ways that I can do that on a personal level. Reading around the blogs that I make time to read on a weekly basis I’ve come across the idea of Life Coaching. This is an idea that has really excited me and has left me wanting more information. So I thought I’d ask a Life Coach that I knew, Christine Livingston from A Different Kind of Work who was amazingly helpful, along with Jen from Reach Our Dreams. I recently ask Christine if she would mind answering some questions for me on what being a Life Coach involves and how it impacts on people’s lives so that I could share  their answers on 6aliens.com. What you read below are her insightful answers to my questions.

If you haven’t come across Christine before this interview, it will be a real eye opener into what she does and how she approaches life. Also check her out at A Different Kind of Work.

Can you describe, Christine, what role a life coach plays in someone’s life?

Good question, Ben! A coach’s role is to help another person – or indeed, a couple, or a team – to achieve something they really want to achieve, or to change something they really want to change.

I think of a coach as being a smart companion to someone else’s important journey. You’re alongside them, reflecting choice points and cross-roads they have, helping them decide between one direction or another, and challenging them at places where they’re reading the map differently to how you might. It’s about helping them understand that often their minds create the obstacles they imagine they see ahead of them, and supporting them to remove their own roadblocks.

When would a person need a life coach? Are there common points in a person’s life when they seek out a life coach?

People use coaches to help them with all sorts of things like becoming more confident; creating more balance in their lives; sorting out their finances; or making some change to their work or career, or a mixture of these things.

My personal passion is in helping smart, professional people who’ve come to some impasse in their working lives. The one most people recognize is redundancy, but actually more of the people I work with come to me because something has happened that has caused them to lose their passion for what they do and this is distressing them. In our society, even now, such moments are seen as points of weakness where the solution is simply to change employers or to “sort yourself out” in some way. My view is that such times in life are opportunities to revisit your sense of identity, and the role work plays in helping you express it. In exploring this stuff, people touch on all aspects of their lives, so whilst work might be the catalyst, it’s rarely something people figure out in isolation to other things.

What do you think is the biggest challenge in life we face in the future?

The world is going through enormous change. We’ve just had and are still suffering the consequences of profound recession. Governments, banks and businesses are in chaos. But I think this is all symptomatic of bigger change. As I talked about in one of my recent posts, power is shifting from being invested in a few people, to being shared by many. Command and control hierarchies are flattening, and leadership is becoming less something conferred by position, and more about individual ability to influence and lead.

In the midst of all of this, work is reinventing itself. This is leading to two parallel challenges. First, the skills people need to be successful in work and business now and for the future are changing. The successful people for the future will be much more self-aware, and more focused on their own development, than was ever the case in the past.

Second, for a period of years, business and working life might feel a little crazy. Wave after wave of change initiatives will challenge people’s skills, patience and personal robustness, not to mention their sanity.

Paradoxically, both of these things create real opportunity for self-development bloggers, coaches and all those people who are interested and prepared to do work on themselves because we are helping to create a different kind of work.

If someone wanted to start achieving something in life now, what would advice would you give?

First of all, I’d challenge them to ask whether what they’re trying to do is really in keeping with who they uniquely are. Often people’s motives are out of line with their strengths and it’s good to understand that early on.

But, assuming there’s a good match, I’d ask them to think about what it was they could do right now that would set them on the path to achievement. Sometimes people wait for some future time to be right to start something. By beginning to do something right now, even in some small way, you send the message to yourself and to the universe that you are serious about your intention.

Do you find that there are pitfalls that we all fall in to? If so what can we do to change those?

To my mind there are 2 common pitfalls: limiting beliefs and unresourceful psychological states.

Limiting beliefs are less than positive things that we unconsciously “know” about ourselves and that get in the way of us being brilliantly who we really are. One that a lot of my clients unearth is “I’m not good enough”. You can see that, if you’ve set off down some path of achievement but not all of you is actually on board, you will not reach your goal.

Working with a coach will help flush out the less than useful things that block you. You can also try some self-coaching. For example, try noticing when you feel uncomfortable about something that you’re striving for, and asking yourself what you’re choosing to believe about yourself right there and then. Chances are you’ll find some negative stuff along the “not good enough” lines. A key thing is to challenge the belief. Sticking with the example, ask yourself, what if I already was as good as I needed to be? What would I be doing? What would I be thinking? How would I be feeling?

Unresourceful states are where we fall into psychological black holes in ourselves. Examples are where we experience ourselves as being really overwhelmed by someone or something; where we feel we’ve got to shut up and put up with something; or conversely, where we lose our temper with someone or something and find ourselves behaving in ways we wouldn’t consciously choose. I’m sure you recognize these places as we all experience them at one time or another. I’m also sure you appreciate first hand how they limit you.

If you want to work on this stuff for yourself, a good starting place is paradoxically to catch yourself feeling strong and at your best, and to notice what you think and how you feel about yourself there. Affirm it as really being “you”. Then, when you find yourself in a less resourceful energetic state, know that you have the choice to shift from where you are, back to the more resourceful you. You can reinforce the shift by physically moving about to shake off the crappier energy.

I would say, however, that if you keep finding yourself in the same black hole, there’s a reason for it, and that could well be something to go discuss with a coach.

Who has inspired you in your life and why?

I can’t say there has been one person. I can think of a few bosses who were my role models at various points when I was employed, because they exemplified forms of leadership to which I aspired.

Then there’s Phil and Colin who run the coach training I did. They are inspirational because their whole ethos is that coach training is as much about supporting coaches to become themselves as it is about learning a bunch of techniques. Doing their training was transformational for me.

And, because I love both reading and writing, there are some writers I find inspiring. Notably people like Ayn Rand and Virginia Wolfe neither of whom conformed to the status quo of what it was “right” to write about at the time. I like people who dare to shake things up a bit!

What advice would you give to someone thinking about working with a life coach?

First, do your homework. Frankly, life coaches are ten a penny. Coaches who can add value and really make a difference to your life are more rare. If you’re looking for people on the Internet, read what they have to say for themselves. Find the ones who are daring to say something a bit different from the others: they will tend to be their own people rather than someone else’s echo. Have exploratory, non-committal conversations with them. If you feel they “get” you and that there’s a good connection between you, brilliant. If you’re not sure, keep looking.

Next, expect to pay. Coaching rates vary widely. It almost doesn’t matter what the fee is per se. What it needs to do is make you think about whether you’re going to spend “that” amount of money on yourself or not. When you decide that you will, you make a commitment to yourself that you’re worth it and that you’re going to see the results that you’re paying for.

Take it seriously. For the time you’re doing coaching, make it a top priority in your life. Put your coaching appointments in your diary and do not cancel them unless you’re sick or going on holiday. Copping out of coaching is actually copping out on yourself and your life.

Enjoy it! If you engage with good coaching, it can be not only transformative, but fun too.

What’s your biggest goal for the future?

I’m shaking up my own business right now, turning it from one that has been run along fairly traditional lines, to one that has much more of a social media aspect and presence. I’m going from appearing to be a generalist to actually being “out” about what I really love and allowing that its own momentum. I have a three-year ambition to bring this wholly to fruition, so that I can live more location independently and have my business generate income for me without me needing to be around all the time.

Christine Livingston coaches and writes for professional people, who are facing some kind of crisis or loss of meaning about work, inspiring and supporting them to use their experiences as opportunities for profound life transformation. She blogs at www.adifferentkindofwork.com. Why not follow her RSS Feed?

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I want to thank Christine to taking the time our of her busy schedule to answer these questions for me and that you all took as much from her replies as I did. Thank you Christine.

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