3 Coaching Techniques Life Coaches and Mentors Use to Help You Reach Your Goals

While reaching goals is good for your self-esteem, goals don’t exist so that we can feel good about ourselves. Humans didn’t invent goal setting simply to receive gold medals, a pat on the back, or bullet points on our resumes. Those are awesome benefits of successfully reaching goals, but they are not the main reason people work so hard to achieve them. There’s a deeply rooted reason, and it’s not about accolades or other shallow rewards.

Goals serve to represent the things that will help us grow and make our lives better. That growth comes from the journey, not the celebration at the end. Setting goals keeps us on track, helps us move forward, and prevents us from getting stuck. When we accomplish our goals, we change our lives, and we make room for new goals so that our lives can become even richer.

People who set goals to learn new languages, for example, don’t do it because they think they’ll look smarter. They do it because learning new languages opens doors to travel, communication, and learning as they have never before experienced. Goals don’t exist so that we can collect trophies to display on our shelves, because the real rewards live inside of us and stay with us forever.

Life coaches (and even mentors) recognize the value of goals beyond accolades and celebrations, and they work to help their clients achieve their biggest goals in any way they can. They know the long term effects reaching new goals can have and how it can positively impact the lives of their clients. Whether your goals span years into the future or are set to be reached a month from now, life coaches are equipped with the tools to help you meet them and grow as much as you can along the way.

Here are 3 of the tools that life coaches use to help you reach your goals:

Tool #1: Uncover your limiting beliefs and mental blocks

Limiting beliefs are the things we tell ourselves that keep us from trying new things and growing as people. These beliefs are often unconscious, and we may not always be aware that we are holding ourselves back from what we really want. We may even consciously make justifications for our limitations. This occurs when we know what we want, but we list all the reasons we can’t have what we want, thus giving more power to our limitations than our dreams.

Life coaches aim to bring these limitations to light, both the ones we are consciously aware of and those that we are not, through a variety of methods. Some coaches use specialized techniques such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), while others rely on simple techniques such as positive affirmations. A belief is only a thought that we keep thinking, and life coaches know that if their clients can change the way they think, they can change their lives. After you’ve found your coach, you will break new ground and reach important life goals.

Tool #2: Use visualization

Visualization has a mystical way of making people’s desires a reality. Although some scenarios may seem impossible, many people have proven the power of visualization and have won lotteries and achieved great things against all odds. Beyond the mystical aspect, visualization is a powerful tool for reaching your goals. It embeds your intentions into your conscious and subconscious mind and keeps you alert to new opportunities that may help you reach your goal faster.

It can also help you get a clearer picture of what you want so that you can develop a detailed and effective plan for reaching your goal. The more you visualize, the more motivated you will be. You will also feel as if you have already achieved what you are striving to accomplish, making the process easier and more exciting. Life coaches are familiar with many forms of visualization and can guide you through it if you’re not sure how to begin.

Tool #3: Set goals and plan

No one is more skilled at setting goals and making plans than a life coach. Every strategic goal setter knows that people rarely achieve their goals in one fell swoop. Goals are achieved one small step at a time, and it’s the daily actions that make the biggest impact. However, it’s not always easy to know which actions should be taken to reach bigger goals, or when.

Backwards planning is often necessary to get a better idea of what needs to be done to attain goals big and small. Life coaches are skilled in planning and possess the knowledge and organizational tools to help you meet your goals as quickly as possible. It’s always better to have a plan than to go through life aimlessly, hoping that you will have all of the things you want some day. Life coaches are trained and ready to help you make plans that will take your life above and beyond.

They’ll also help you develop patience and persistence when things get tough…and they will.

Reaching goals is about more than feeling good or showing off. We want what we want for a reason, and it’s usually because we believe that having or doing these things will make our lives better. The best experiences often come on our journey to reaching our goals, and the great experiences we have after can be credited to what we have learned and how we have grown along the way.

Goals allow us to change in ways that make us better, and they allow us to explore all the wonderful things the world has to offer. Working with a life coach can help you experience the joy of reaching your goals, living your dreams, and so much more.