Everybody could benefit from working with a life coach from time to time to help navigate some of the bigger challenges and changes in life. For some, however, accessing a life coach isn’t always an option because of time, financial, geographical or other considerations.

When you work with a life coach, you quickly realise that part of what the coach does is teach you a number of essential life skills such as how to identify what’s really important to you, what you want and don’t want and, of course, how to set and achieve your goals.

Here are some of the foundational strategies and tools that life coaches use, which you can use to coach yourself.

The GROW model

This is the most important tool in the coach’s toolkit and forms the foundation for nearly every coaching conversation. GROW is the easy-to-remember acronym covering four core questions: What is the Goal you want to achieve? What is the current Reality for you, or in other words, what’s the story behind the goal and why do you want it? What Options do you see as available at this time and how are you measuring them? What can you do as your first step, or Way Forward, toward meeting your goal?

These four questions may sound fairly simple but the model works. It’s important to keep in mind that these questions are simply a starting point for further questioning and exploration. To gain more clarity about the goal, you could also ask some of the following questions:

Goal

• What are the goals you want to achieve? Write them down.
• What would you like to be different when you are done using this model to coach yourself?
• When do you want to achieve this goal?
• How challenging will it be to achieve your goal?
• How will you know when you have achieved your goal?

 

Reality

• What is happening now that indicates you have a problem?
• How do you know this is accurate?
• How often does this happen?
• What effect does this have?
• What have you tried so far to overcome the problem?
• What is happening now that is good and that you would like to keep happening?
• What is someone else’s perception of the situation?
• What have you tried so far?
• Do you know anyone who has achieved this goal?
• What can you learn from them?
• What obstacles are in your way that prevent you from reaching your goal?

Options

• What five things could you do?
• What could you do as a first step?
• What alternatives are there to that approach?
• What else could you do?
• What would (your boss, your partner etc) suggest you do?
• What are the benefits and pitfalls of that option?
• Which option would you most like to act on?
• What would happen if you did nothing?
• What would you do if you had unlimited resources?

Wrap up/Way forward

• What is the next step?
• What actions will you take in order to achieve your goal?
• When will you do what?
• How long do you think that will take?
• What support might you need?
• How and when can you get that support?
• What obstacles do you expect to face?
• How will you overcome them?

A point to remember about the GROW model is that although you may start off well, as you continue through the series of questions you may discover the real goal is something different from what you started with. This is absolutely fine and likely to happen to you on more than one occasion.