10 Benefits to Working with a Life Coach and Therapist

Frustrated with work? Lonely? But that’s nothing new. Seems to be what’s meant for you. Makes you feel sad, like you’re on the outside watching others take part in the game of life.

You’ve tried so hard, put in so much effort, are so good at what you do professionally and yet here you are in a crappy job situation and on your own. And it’s likely to stay like this you tell yourself gloomily as you picture yourself as an old woman, on your own.

You feel a sudden and urgent impulse to say  ‘no’ as tears slide down your cheeks. However bad you feel, you’re not ready to give up yet. You want more for yourself, you want a chance at happiness. 

You probably feel overwhelmed about where to start. Who to turn to? A life coach? A therapist? Here’s how working with someone who is both a therapist-coach can help you.

1. You Don’t Need to Find a Separate Life Coach and Therapist

Working with a therapist-coach you get the best of both worlds. You get to work on present goals and develop specific plans to move your life forwards. But,  when you get get stuck on the actioning part, which is often the case, you get to do a therapeutic deep-dive into the past.

And you feel safe to do that because you know I’m a trained therapist who has many years of experience working with very traumatised clients. 

When I speak to life coach colleagues, I hear about clients they have to refer on because they’re not ready for life coaching yet. They’ve embedded thinking and behaving processes that need to be resolved before life coaching can be effective. With me, you get to do both with the same person. 

2. You Change Dysfunctional Thinking and Behaving

So let’s say you’ve been procrastinating all your life. You’ve got self-help books on the topic piled high on your bed side table . You’ve done life coaching before and it hasn’t worked because, guess what? You procrastinated attending the sessions even though you paid for them! 

You’ve recently lost a relationship partly due to this issue and you really need to sort this shit out. So, you come to me. We first try life-coachy things like setting the bar very low with the ‘to do’ list. Like agreeing to spend 10 minutes researching about working as a photographer (your dream job) before your next session. 

That doesn’t work. 

Next I take into consideration the Gestalt Therapy ‘Paradoxical Theory of Change’. This posits that change only happens when we fully embrace who we are. I playfully explore with you what it would look like if you fully accepted your procrastinating. 

Maybe there’s a Gestalt experiment we can create to explore this. How about if for a day (probably at the  weekend) you made yourself procrastinate  absolutely EVERYTHING? The spirit to an experiment  is one of curiosity.

It’s not meant to ‘fix’ the issue but to shed more awareness on your procrastinating process and more awareness can lead to change. You come back the next session and de-brief and we talk about what you’ve learned and what to do or try next.

That might be another Gestalt experiment of putting your ‘procrastinator’ in the chair. Or it might include attachment-informed EMDR to do a deep dive into how the procrastinating part came about and to tackle head-on the unhelpful beliefs it’s covering up. Often these are around feeling like a failure. 

3. You Get Clear on your Needs and Wants

So let’s say you’ve shifted some stuff in therapy and you understand yourself better. You feel clearer about your needs and wants and the differences between the two. When you came you didn’t know if you wanted a relationship or not. 

As a Gestalt therapist I’ve helped you to explore your ambivalence. I’ve asked you to speak as the part that doesn’t want a romantic relationship. I’ve also asked you to speak as the part that might. I’ve invited you to embody these parts, to walk around the room as you speak and to notice what happens in your body, how much energy you have, where you feel the energy in your body. 

The two parts have sat down and talked with each other and hashed it out over a good few sessions.  You now feel clearer that you’d like to meet someone but fear being overwhelmed by them and losing your identity. 

With this clarity I support you to figure out ways you can action the plan to meet someone. And to communicate the boundaries that help you feel safe and in control. I might support you to find ways to say “ I really didn’t like it when you turned over to go to sleep without saying ‘goodnight’. As opposed to saying nothing, which you usually do, and then feeling resentful, hurt and ignored.

4. You Connect with Your Body and Feel More Grounded

Closely connected to knowing your needs and wants is how connected you are to your body. We live in an age where the cognitive realm dominates and is more highly valued than the body and emotions.

We’re scrolling more, texting more and living in a virtual world more. As a nation (the UK at any rate) we spend extensive time on our backsides and less and less time being physically active and outdoors in nature.

If we experienced emotional trauma as a child, we  learned that the body, which is the seat of the emotions, is not a safe place to inhabit. So we disconnect even more.

Problem is, if we aren’t connected to our bodies and thus our emotions, we’re often walking around clueless. Clueless about what we want and what we need to feel fulfilled. Clueless about whether we’re in the right relationship.

We’re often not practicing good self-care and can be actively harming ourselves through taking too many drugs etc.

As a Gestalt therapist my approach is holistic and I view mind, body and emotion as connected and of equal importance. I might invite you to tell me what you notice in your body as you’re telling me about your boss. Or ask you to make a gesture to show how you’re doing right now.

I’ve asked clients to exaggerate something they’re doing with their body like hunching their shoulders. Clients have also spoken as a body part to explore it more.

By doing so you gradually connect more with your body. You feel more solid and grounded. Your body starts to feel like a safe space and you feel more like you can trust it and yourself. 

These are all ways as a therapist I can help you connect more with your body and your emotions so that you can start to feel more fulfilled. And if doing so brings up trauma and painful feelings, as it might, then we process that in a respectful and appropriate way.f

5. You Improve Your Self-Care

Deciding to work with a life coach and therapist is an act of self-care. You’re enlisting someone into your life who’s there to support you and care about you. You’re saying that you care enough about yourself to do this.

Insufficient self-care shows up in lots of ways. Obvious ways are excessive drinking, drug-taking, disordered eating, workaholism, over-exercising to name a few. More subtle ways are consistently putting others needs before our own, being overly harsh and critical of ourselves, or not eating well, amongst others.

In our sessions I point out when I hear you talking to yourself harshly. This makes you more aware of when you do this and I invite you to experiment with talking to yourself more compassionately.

We might explore unhelpful beliefs that are blocking your self-care. Maybe you hate your hair because your mum criticised you about it as a kid. Or you don’t take the time to cook for yourself because you don’t feel good enough. 

We challenge these negative beliefs. Is it really true that you’re not good enough? Not good enough for who and in what way?

Tell me about the ways you aren’t good enough. Then tell me about the ways you are good enough. Say them again, loud and clear. What does it feel like in your body to declare just how good enough you are?

Other ways we can work with negative beliefs are through attachment-informed EMDR or exploring how holding on to a negative belief serves us in some way.

6. You Optimise Your Functioning

As a  life coach and therapist I can help you optimise your functioning. Perhaps you’ve already had therapy and have good awareness of yourself and are happy with most areas of your life. Or perhaps you were one of the lucky ones who had parents who didn’t fuck them up that much, relatively speaking.

Perhaps you really enjoy your job but it’s taking over your life. You’re thinking ahead to when you retire and not wanting there to be a big void once you stop working. You also want to have more work/life balance in the present but don’t know what you enjoy doing, other than work.

I support you to come up with ideas of things you could enjoy. I might use the concepts and tools from Designing Your Life ( the New York Times best-selling book based on the methodology that Bill Burnett and Dave Evans developed, and is taught in a class of the same name at Stanford University).

Perhaps you’re stuck because you don’t have a passion like others seem to. I suggest you haven’t found your passion yet. The DYL book points out that most of us don’t know what our passion is.

We try things, we do things. If we like them we keep doing them. We keep learning and mastering until one or a few of those things start to feel like a passion.

In fact, telling yourself that you don’t know what your passions are is a clever way to stop yourself from even trying to cut down on working. In other words, it’s just an excuse.

My job as a life coach and therapist is to call you out, help you to re-frame and invite you to start exploring stuff that you’re interested in rather than passionate about.

7. You Are Held Accountable

I will call you out at times, in a caring and light-hearted way. I will also hold you accountable because I don’t want you to miss out on the benefits you want for yourself.

I’ll point out when I notice you’re slipping away from your goal and are procrastinating or filling your diary with work and other commitments thus sabotaging your goals. 

We then explore what is happening. Is there an underlying belief of unworthiness? Is your identity tied to your working status?

Is there a perfectionistic part that can only do something if it does it perfectly? Is there a part that fears ‘failing’? I challenge you on unhelpful beliefs and we can do some therapeutic work around them if appropriate.

8. You Feel Emotionally Supported

Making any kind of change can feel scary and daunting. You can also feel on your own, especially if you’re making changes in areas of life where your friends and colleagues feel satisfied.  Working with a life coach and therapist helps you feel supported and less like you’re on our own with it all. 

It’s a safe space where you can bring doubts and confusions and hash them out in a place where you won’t be judged and where there is no bias. Sometimes friends feel fearful that your changes mean you will have less time for them so they are critical. Working with a life coach and therapist you can take the time to feel confident about your actions and plans before sharing them with others.

9. You Increase your self-worth (and perhaps your financial worth too).

Committing to sessions with a life coach-therapist means you’re committing to yourself and your value. You’re telling yourself that you’re worth the time and money. This sends a valuable message to yourself.

It means you want to do the necessary work required to achieve your goals because you believe you’re worthy of the fulfillment and joy you’ll feel as a result of achieving them.

Yes at times you might still struggle with feelings of unworthiness and we’ll tackle them in our sessions. We’ll tackle them with cognitive re-frames and/or do some therapeutic work if they’ve been around a long time.

Often for example, we adopt a belief that we ‘re ‘unworthy’ because of a parent’s rejecting behaviour. Their behaviour has actually nothing to do with us, it’s on them. But as a child we decided to ‘agree’  with them that we’re unworthy as we think it will make our parent reject us less (which of course it doesn’t). 

So we might work on the past roots of the belief. At the same time by committing to sessions with a life coach and therapist, you’re adjusting your present behaviour so that it signals a powerful shift. You are aligning your present actions with the belief of being worthy.

This increased sense of worth enhances your relationships, your work and perhaps even your pockets. If you decide that you’re worthy of earning more than you currently do.

10. You Improve Your Communication and Relationships

I gave the example of how we might work with relationship ambivalence in section 3. Another way is to work with our relationship. You might at one point perceive me as critical when I’m feeling anything but critical. We can explore how you are projecting your critical voice onto me and how you do that with others. Projecting is the process by which we we ascribe to the other qualities that are our own.

Or you might feel annoyed with me for forgetting something you said. Your usual relationship pattern is to stay quiet and feel resentful. With me, I encourage you to share your annoyance so that you have an experience of doing that. Practicing with me ( and seeing I don’t get annoyed if you confront me) makes you more confident to be assertive in other relationships