Life Coaching Methods

Life coaching is an innovative field that aims to motivate the individual to find answers to their own questions and solutions to the major obstacles that might hinder their ability to achieve their life goals. Traditional life coaching focuses on this idea that the individual should be guided to their own solutions. Hybrid strategies have been born out of life coaching methods with other professional fields, like business and nutrition. New developments in technology also provide future benefits in combining these two techniques.

Branching out from psychotherapy, life coaching provides a way to motivate people to make better decisions to empower themselves to create their own environment that increases their overall well being. Traditional life coaching focuses on a life coach who prods, questions, and guides the individual to find the motivation to solve their own problems. This essentially empowers the individual to solve their own problems. The recent discourse shows that these more traditional techniques are being combined with other types of genres to create truly hybrid strategies.

Further combining traditional techniques with other hybrid alternatives will continue to provide a multi-faceted approach to individual motivation and guidance to reach very specific goals that cross a number of boundaries. Literature Review Life coaching is all about helping the individual reach some goal or objective, not matter what genre that goal may fall under. Essentially, "coaching is about helping someone to achieve their own personal goals that they themselves set" (Dunbar, 2010, p 7).

Traditional life coaching itself was originally a hybrid genre that was born out of several "intellectual traditions of sports psychology, organizational scholarship, business management, motivational theories, decision science, and other fields to help motivate and support their clients" (Biswas-Diener, 2009, p 545). It focuses on using questioning as a way for coaches to help guide their coaches towards their own answers and solutions. As such, "coaching involves asking questions to help the coachee realize previously un-thought of solutions. Most coaches do not attempt to provide the answers for a coachee" (Dunbar, 2010, p 7).

The individual must find their own path to their best generated solution. This is, of course, done with the help with of a licensed profession who knows best how to deal with the unique problems of individuals. There is an "importance of heavily client-directed sessions in which the client sets the agenda and defines the desirable outcomes" (Biswas-Diener, 2009, p 546). On the other hand, hybrid coaching combines elements from a wide variety of other genres. Life coaching strategies have evolved into a hybrid set of practices within the larger field (Dunbar, 2010).

A wide variety of industries and professional genres can benefit from the techniques and strategies found within life coaching philosophies. Hybrid life coaching techniques provide a connection to other fields, like nutrition. Most often, hybrid strategies focus on finding and exploiting a common synergy between the different genres, "which means combining multiple strategies together that become force multipliers of exponential results" (Pineault, 2012). Zach Marcy, one life coach and nutritionist who has been combining nutrition with traditional life coaching techniques, has a client based that is 65% female (Pineault, 2012).

Many women have both cognitive and physical goals they hope to achieve in order to find a better quality of life. This shows how hybrid strategies can best serve individual markets better than traditional life coaching alone. Hybrid strategies focus on using a wide variety of strategies to provide for a desired transformation. One such genre is known as transformation coaching (Pineault, 2012). This is essentially a combination of traditional life coaching techniques with hybrid ones.

Physical and mental goals that can be met by combining strategies that provides benefits for the body and mind. Moreover, technology provides a way to combine traditional life coaching w2ith a wide variety of other genres. Even in traditional life coaching techniques, "coaches tend to make greater use of technology than do most therapists, including online assessments, e-mail contacts, and teleconferencing-based sessions" (Biswas-Diener, 2009, p 546). Thus, hybridizing traditional life coaching techniques is not a new phenomenon.

Traditional life coaching can be combined with the use of innovative technology applications to produce a new form of providing life coaching in a hybrid form. There are systems that virtually provide intelligent hybrid life coaching strategies for individuals at a fraction of the cost of traditional life coaching methods. According to the research, "these intelligent systems will make our devices come to life, taking on new functions as our personal virtual 'psychotherapist' or life coach" (Celko, 2012).

Mindbloom is one of the latest of the innovative life coaching applications that provides a combination of life coaching, psychotherapeutic and other genres of therapy and guidance for individuals without the added.