Life Coaching for Balance

IN ANY ROLE IN LIFE there’s the core work involved and the self-sustaining journey of character buried and latticed within the management of that work. Balance is necessary within, and between, these two.

When people begin to have relationship issues due to any role they have in life, whether it’s in the home, at work or in the community, there is always work to be done on this secondary character level. It’s never usually a case of technical incompetence, although the barriers put up can suggest so.

And this is where coaching can help.

Coaching for balance involves three things, fundamentally:

1. Offering support
2. Creating challenge i.e. to help the person coached set goals
3. Facilitating a professional or personal vision (or both) for achievement

Particularly when we have difficult-to-counter change occur in life, we have problems with balance, and whilst we’ll often try stoically to go on with our tasks in the face of difficulties, we can’t hide the impacts these imbalances cause.

They leak out of us, and so the relational upsets occur because we’re not ourselves. People can’t help notice the change and the impacts that change is making on us.

Coaching doesn’t so much help with the technical aspects of the work, but it ties all contingencies of the work together in the form of the relationship efficacies—re-creating the worth and value often missing at the relationship level.

Relationship efficacies, the central pivot of most technical outcomes and their sustainability, can only be realised with support, and from that, a challenge that will facilitate the required transformation the person coached seeks.

For this they’ll need to define their own personal and/or professional vision of what the outcome must look like. From there, the coach will simply lead them through a process where the person coached will direct their own destiny.

When balance is eventually struck the perfect technology of effective coaching is again seen as winning the day!

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.