Specialties
Life Coaching is different than mental health therapy. But I find myself doing it a lot anyway in my practice. Here are my current thoughts about it. Life coaching as a specific profession is a relative newcomer in today’s counseling market. It’s not psychotherapy, of the type where deep-level change comes from a re-engagement with one’s past, especially as it remains in the subconscious as an inhibitor to a fuller life in the present. Instead, it begins with what is, as the engagement point for a deeper and enhanced ongoing life. It’s a type of counseling frequently marketed to help people succeed, especially in businesses or personal relationships – more like a consultant or mentor. It’s not a licensed profession, and no uniform professional standards have emerged.
My son Michael is a Life Coach and Life Coach Trainer in the San Francisco Bay area, and he keeps feeding me the lively aspects of its development. Perhaps in the near future, I’ll rewrite this section.
I list it here because some of my client relationships involve what I will call mentoring. I’m now old enough to be considered an elder in our culture. I have inherited a more profound wisdom from this sense of history and the cultural heritage that has formed over the generations.
Sometimes, I see psychotherapy as a newer model, with a medical model attachment, whereas life coaching is the re-emergence of more ancient life wisdom.
For definition sake, I consider knowledge to be the product of gathered facts and information. Conversely, wisdom is using that knowledge to get essential things done, improve oneself, and benefit the larger community. We can learn the former in school, from books (and YouTube). The latter we gain basically with age and experience—from Living.
In earlier times, knowledge was not as fragmented as it is today into various fields like psychology, sociology, theology, anthropology, biology, and numerous other ‘disciplines’ that study what it means to be human and a part of the natural world. In those times, the storyteller often carried the wisdom of the ages implicit in their story-telling—and those stories themselves were many, many generations old. My heritage and development as a storyteller often become a tool of profound change and practical wisdom for clients.
For example, one beneficial area of such ‘coaching’ is my expertise in the nature and secrets of male/female relationships. For some clients who are single or newly single, I become a ‘dating coach.’
[I may someday include another section about my Relationship Coach skills.]