Identifying, acknowledging, and living according to a life purpose is perhaps the most important step that successful people take. Without a purpose to guide your client’s goals, the actions you advise them to take may not fulfill him/her. It’s easy to get side-tracked, to wander and drift, but with a clearly defined life purpose, everything in life seems to fall into place or fall out of your client’s life. Let’s explore the role of coaching and the issues involved in eliciting a client’s life purpose.
Like many other services it sometimes gets hard to quantify the results of coaching services. One good way to do this is to define the results in the form of deliverables coming out of the coaching process. If we talk about the deliverables of coaching for a client, “Discovery of the Client’s Life Purpose for him/her” ranks at the highest value. Mark Twain’s famous saying backs this up:
“The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
It is within a great coach’s capacity to realize the second most important day in a clients life. Significant life transitions can be eased and simplified if the client understands his or her life purpose.
Before moving on to “How the coach can help client to know the life purpose?” (which I will be covering in my next article), let’s just briefly highlight the value that a coach brings to the entire coaching process in helping the client realize their life purpose.
A coach’s main role is to travel WITH the client on the “path of development”. I call it the “Journey of Self-Rise”. Coaching is a journey and like any other journey, one needs to be moving in the right direction to reach the destination. There are milestones which need to be defined along the way. Setting the milestones (goals) before knowing the clear direction and destination definitely brings weak results. It is no surprise that clients will not achieve most of their milestones (goals) if these milestones aren’t aligned with their true direction and destination. Clearly in my opinion, a prerequisite to goal setting is the client knowing their life purpose.
Here are some of the other benefits for the coaching process, which result from identifying the client’s true life purpose.
a) Focus
All the energy throughout the entire coaching process gets focused on 1 core theme. This makes it easy to decide goals and define an action plan.
b) Trust/Confidence
The client feels confident of your abilities and trusts you as a coach.
c) Passion
The client feels a lot more passionate about the coaching process and a lot more involved. This passion becomes the fuel that propels them forward, often in extraordinary ways.
d) Flow
This feat brings the flow to coaching process. This further creates the “snow-ball effect”. Momentum is generated and we all know the advantages momentum brings.
By eliciting a client’s life purpose to them and then letting them focus on their life purpose with laser intensity, they gain an ever deepening knowledge and awareness of who they are and how they operate in the world . They will become the best they can be; they’ll get better results from the things they’re already doing; they’ll do new things that they never dreamed they could do; and problems that used to plague them will cease to exist. You as coach can improve the life of your client dramatically by helping them discover how to live their life “authentically”.
In my article next month we will discuss: “Methods to Elicit Life Purpose”.
