A life coach is a professional who sets you on the track that leads you to your best self in work, life, and most commonly, both. They create a plan tailored to your goals and desires, supporting you as you put the steps into action. Spiritual life coaching (also known as spiritual coaching) is a niche type of life coaching. It aims to help you transcend any previous limits to tap into your higher purpose. It helps you discover and embrace your true self. In other words, this form of coaching tunes into your own spiritual journey.
Many people might confuse spiritual coaches with religious leaders, but these are two very different things. You don’t have to be religious to work with a spiritual life coach. Likewise, a spiritual life coach may or may not be religious. What you have to have is the openness to deepening your connection with the nonphysical part of yourself, your soul.
Spiritual coaches are different from therapists. On the one hand, spiritual coaches never seek to diagnose their clients. What matters for a spiritual coach is understanding the unique experience of the individual, not the category they can be put into. Likewise, spiritual life coaches take the “partner” approach in your life instead of an “authority” role which tends to be more common in therapy. Lastly, spiritual life coaches are very much focused on your spiritual growth and life purpose instead of more specific problems you may want to overcome.
Spiritual coaches may differ in their approaches and methods. Some may look to religion, others may look to energy or even spirit guides. Many take a holistic approach, looking at every element of your life and noting the links between these and your purpose. Regardless of the approach, a spiritual coach’s mission is to help you set spiritual goals.
These goals include determining your values, cultivating self-knowledge, generating insight about different circumstances in your life, or clarifying your purpose in life. To achieve this, spiritual life coaches have a number of techniques they use with their clients.
Spiritual life coaches believe in the power of creation, so they will help you create a life mission or a life plan. To do this, they help arrange your life in alignment with only those spiritual principles for which you have decided to exist.
They also create accountability structures. This helps coaches hold clients responsible for living according to their principles and goals. This is important because many times it’s hard to get started with spiritual work, especially when the incentives are not present in the very short term.
Throughout an engagement with a client, spiritual life coaches do active listening and ask powerful questions. Also, the coach will recognize, underscore, and celebrate constructive elements that openly exist in your life, but that you may have overlooked.
An important element of spiritual coaching is reframing. The spiritual life coach will challenge a client’s mindset and can help reframe an old understanding of a specific situation. A coach can help you drop negative beliefs and blinders that prevent you from seeing possibilities or taking action.
Lastly, spiritual coaches help you open new horizons. Depending on the coach’s own background, they can help to deepen your insight or broaden your spiritual horizons and what might be possible for you to achieve in your life.
Spiritual life coaching is a very specific type of life coaching, and as such, its history comes from that of life coaching. But how did the idea of life coaching catch on? It started back in the 1960s when we started talking about our lives using metaphors from sports.
A “coach” meant any form of a tutor from about the 1830s. It was probably an extension of the idea of transporting people from one place to another (associated with the original meaning of the word “coach”). But certainly, the most common use in contemporary society has been its application to sports coaching.
Timothy Gallwey’s book The Inner Game of Tennis (1974) has been widely cited as a significant influence in the development of coaching. Gallwey talks about how in tennis, the other side of the net isn’t the only one working against you. You also have an inner opponent which takes the form of your ego-mind.
Gallwey’s principles can be applied to many domains, from sports to work. In relation to the evolution of coaching, Gallwey’s book was central to the creation of the GROW model, probably the most influential model of coaching around. In parallel, Werner Erhard (also regarded as an important influence in the topic of coaching), ran “est” or Erhard Seminars Training at the Esalan Institute. They were part of the broader human potential movement developed in the 60’s, which was about cultivating wellness and personal transformation.
A third figure that was highly influential in the development of coaching was Thomas Leonard. Leonard worked as the Budget Director for Landmark Education in the 1980s. As a financial advisor, he found that people were often seeking more than just financial guidance when they came to him. That’s how Thomas Leonard started being a life advisor and calling himself a coach. When coaching others, he drew together knowledge from a number of different fields along with instruments used by est. A coaching methodology began to take shape.
The real tipping point in the spread of coaching was probably the mid-’90s when business coaching really took off. IBM was the first large company that made use of coaching, which “took coaching from being a personal development vehicle for individuals to a way of developing people in business”. The period of 1990 to 2004 saw coaching emerge as a distinct profession. In fact, this period saw exponential growth of coaching as well as markedly increased visibility of coaching in the public sector.
With this huge growth in popularity, the concept of life coaching started to specialize. Nowadays there are financial coaches, relationship coaches, business coaches, career coaches, executive coaches, and of course, spiritual coaches. Simply put, spiritual coaches help you achieve spiritual fulfillment by aligning your actions with your individual spiritual purpose.
Finding our own life purpose based on our own spiritual compass sounds easy in theory. In practice, it is a topic that most people struggle with. Depending on how disconnected someone is from these fundamental spiritual questions, some can truly struggle not only mentally, but in all other facets. A spiritual coach can help with these questions and implement the answers.
Identify your default setting and subconscious thoughts. Working with a spiritual coach will help you assess and re-program your conditioning so that you are using your unconscious thinking to your advantage. It will also help you avoid your conscious mind desiring one thing and working in complete opposition to your subconscious mind.
Learn the laws of the universe. Working with a spiritual coach helps you learn about the laws of the universe. Coaches look at how you learn and process and they work with you to expand your understanding of yourself and the world around you.
Conscious living. Spiritual coaches believe in matching your own vibration to that which you desire. They help you elevate your frequency so that you can tune into what you want. This shift is a game-changer when it comes to conscious creation.
Find out who you really are and connect to your life purpose. A spiritual coach will help you make a decision that feels in alignment with your spirit. A spiritual coach asks you to show up for yourself, stand in your truth, and spend time uncovering what makes you happy.
Release trauma, clear stagnation, heal old wounds, and open energy blocks. A spiritual coach will assist in getting into the stored trauma we have in our physical bodies. Working with someone who can support these energetic shifts allows you to step forward as a clearer channel.
Deepen connection to who you truly are. A spiritual coach will ask the questions and guide your journey of deep self-discovery. Beyond just seeing what you do, how you act, how you handle situations, stress, or conflict, a spiritual coach will help you work on areas of yourself that would benefit from growth.
Finding a spiritual coach is very personal. Spiritual coaches can be traditional life coaches with a specialization in spiritual coaching, but they can also be therapists, healers, or simply spiritual practitioners. While there are some certification programs available, they are not a real requirement to become a spiritual life coach.
What is most important when looking for a spiritual life coach is the shared values or spiritual belief system as well as your level of comfort. Referrals are usually helpful when finding a reputable spiritual life coach that can really be helpful to you. If not, there are some online tools that can help you with that, such as Noomii.
Regardless of the source, you should contact a few options. The more coaches you interview, the more you will learn about what you want in a coach. Usually, speaking to 3-5 options before making a decision is a good rule of thumb. You should also get their coaching policy and price schedule. But more importantly, finding out if the coach shares a similar belief system is one of the most crucial aspects. You should feel secure and comfortable, even with some differences.
Spiritual life coaching sessions are private and one-on-one. Sessions are held either in person or through online platforms. In spiritual life coaching sessions, the coach will help you determine your goals and challenges, look at where you are and where you want to be, and work to uncover anything that is holding you back from achieving your dreams.
Sessions can focus on a variety of topics ranging from relationships, career, health, children, goals, daily life, and spirituality. There could be techniques involved during sessions, like meditation or visualization to assist the process.
While spiritual life coaching is different from therapy, there are some logistical aspects that are similar. Sessions can be weekly or bi-weekly, typically ranging between 45 and 60 min. The frequency can be adjusted depending on progress. The coach will likely provide some areas to work on with specific action items to discuss in the next session.
Here are some interesting facts to the overall concept of life coaching, which has become so popular in the last couple of decades, and where spiritual life coaching comes from:
The benefits that you can receive from hiring a spiritual life coach can be beyond life-changing. You will not only grow and expand as a person but also as a spiritual being having a human life experience.
Working with a spiritual life coach will allow you to see your world and your life in a new light. You will become the creator of your life rather than the reactor. You will learn to make decisions that strengthen your bond with yourself and others. Lastly, you will be able to understand what you need to become happy, whole, and spiritually in-tune.
