What’s life coaching?
Co-Active describes a life coach as “someone who can help you see where your life is right now, while also helping you create a vision of where you want it to go and a plan to get there.” In short, I help people live a more balanced life in alignment with their values.
What can it help with?
Coaching is inherently tailored to your personal and professional goals, but is often helpful when you’re considering or making a life transition, feeling stuck on a change you’d like to make, or just trying to find balance and live more intentionally. Below are examples of what I’ve helped clients with:
Career and purpose: Maybe you’re starting a new role, changing your career, or coping with imposter syndrome. Or you’re burnt out at work, feeling stuck in golden handcuffs, or weighing climbing the ladder vs yolo-quitting to travel around the world. Or maybe you’re looking for more purpose outside of work. How is your relationship with work, and what do you want to build with your life?
Finding balance: Being an adult is hard and there’s a lot of crap our parents and schooling never prepared for. Managing finances, staying fit, finding (and keeping) healthy relationships as an adult, dating in an app-driven world, juggling hobbies with work commitments. Do you find time to just be and not do anything? How balanced is your life?
Values and identity: Values subconsciously dictate our behavior, and we often aren’t aware of what truly motivates us. Without intentional introspection, we default to living according to what society, peers, or our parental upbringing prioritizes inauthentically. How well do you understand your motivations and self-limiting beliefs? Are you living in alignment with your values?
What does it look like?
While the agenda is always tailored to the client, my coaching always involves:
Rules of engagement co-designed by the coach and client. Coaching is less formalized than therapy and not a replacement for medical diagnoses or therapy, but this means the dynamic can be more personalized.
Creating a safe space for clients to introspect on their relationships, values, and goals. This can happen through exploring questions, reflection assignments, exercises like visualization and physical embodiment, etc.
Making intuitive observations, challenging the client with new perspectives or actions, and holding space to process emotions that come up throughout the process.
Asking tough but important questions about life. Ones we rarely have time to think about in the autopilot of daily life.
Jointly building action plans, serving as a sounding board, and helping hold accountability in service of the client’s agenda.
If you’re still wondering ‘how is this different from therapy or consulting?’ I have more details here!
My coaching experience
I first received coaching in early 2020 after returning from my 3-month solo backpacking trip amidst a period of existential angst (my ‘quarter-life crisis’). I went in expecting it to be a super direct action plan like ‘I want to get to Z, tell me what steps A, B, C are’, but my experience was instead much broader, an extension of prior therapy work. It helped me balance my often neurotic mind at a time when I needed to process the heavy emotions of a breakup and the onset of the pandemic, as well as better understand personal goals and insecurities around enoughness.
As an Asian-American growing up in an immigrant family, I also found reconciling contradictory Eastern parental and Western societal values extremely challenging. With one foot in each world, I struggled to navigate filial piety, constant emphasis on career capital/wealth acquisition, and risk-aversion with ideas of individualism, personal ‘passions’, and less orthodox career decisions.
I spent those early pandemic months learning various developmental topics like somatic psychology, nonviolent communication, and relational intelligence. But ultimately I gravitated back to coaching. I realized I’m living most in alignment with my values when I’m able to authentically connect with someone through deep conversations and help them cultivate growth. In 2023, I completed the Co-Active professional coach training with over 125 hours of courses and coaching combined and have since helped clients achieve their personal and professional goals.
Getting started
If you’re thinking ‘hmm yeah I should probably think through some of this stuff for my life’ or ‘I’m thinking of making a change in my life, what should I do?’ Here are a few ideas:
If you want resources to learn about passion, fulfillment, psychology, and philosophy more broadly, I’ve compiled some of my favorite articles, books, and content creators in ‘Resources for deeper reflection’.
If you want to specifically understand your underlying goals and motivations better, I recommend starting with a Values and Saboteur reflection. Values help define what it means to live a fulfilling life. Equally important, saboteurs are what keep you from living in alignment with these values.
If you’re looking for more resources or guidance, feel free to reach out to me below! I offer free consultations and am happy to answer any questions about coaching.