Tag: Coaching

What Does a Life Coach Actually Do? A Guide to Coaching for Clarity and Growth

What Does a Life Coach Actually Do? A Guide to Coaching for Clarity and Growth

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Many people have heard of life coaching, but few truly understand what a life coach does. Is it like therapy? Mentoring? Advice-giving?

In reality, life coaching is something quite different — and potentially transformative.

At Spirit Bear Coaching, I help people find clarity, balance, and purpose in their lives. This guide will help you understand what life coaching really involves and how it might help you move forward.

What Is Life Coaching?

Life coaching is a collaborative process designed to help you clarify your goals, overcome obstacles, and create meaningful change.

Unlike therapy, which often explores your past to promote healing, coaching focuses on the present and future — identifying what you want next, and how to get there.

A life coach doesn’t give you all the answers. Instead, they help you uncover your own — by asking powerful questions, offering reflection, and holding space for growth.

What Does a Life Coach Actually Do?

A good life coach acts as both a mirror and a guide. During coaching sessions, we might:

  • Explore what truly matters to you — your values, priorities, and sense of purpose.
  • Identify patterns or beliefs that might be holding you back.
  • Help you set clear, realistic goals.
  • Provide tools and strategies to stay accountable and motivated.
  • Support you through transitions, challenges, or uncertainty.

Life coaching is a partnership — one that’s focused entirely on your development, confidence, and well-being.

Areas Where Life Coaching Can Help

People seek coaching for many reasons, including:

  • Life transitions such as career changes, relocation, or relationship shifts.
  • Burnout or stress when you feel stuck or overwhelmed.
  • Work-life balance, especially when you’re juggling too much.
  • Confidence building and personal growth.
  • Finding deeper meaning or direction in your life or career.

Whether your goals are practical or deeply personal, coaching offers space to pause, reflect, and move forward with intention.

What Happens in a Coaching Session?

Each session is a conversation designed to create clarity and progress. A typical session includes:

  • A short check-in on how you’re feeling and what’s changed.
  • Focused exploration of a current challenge or goal.
  • Reflection and insight — uncovering what’s beneath the surface.
  • Practical action steps for the week ahead.

At Spirit Bear Coaching, my approach blends mindfulness, reflection, and action, helping clients connect inner awareness with outward change.

Benefits of Life Coaching

Clients often describe coaching as both grounding and energizing.

Some key benefits include:

  • A stronger sense of clarity and purpose.
  • Improved balance between personal and professional life.
  • Greater self-awareness and confidence.
  • Clear, achievable steps toward your goals.
  • Renewed motivation and emotional well-being.

How to Choose the Right Life Coach

When choosing a coach, look for:

  • Professional training and credentials (for example, I hold an MA, PG Dip, MAC accreditation and
    a Master Member of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).
  • A personal connection — you should feel comfortable and supported.
  • A free consultation, so you can explore whether the coach’s style suits your needs.

The best results come from a trusting, collaborative relationship.

Getting Started with Spirit Bear Coaching

If you’re ready to create positive change, I invite you to explore Life Coaching in Tunbridge Wells or online.

You can book a free consultation to discuss your goals and see if coaching feels right for you.

Book your consultation →

Final Thoughts

Life coaching isn’t about fixing you — it’s about helping you discover what’s already within you.

Through curiosity, reflection, and action, you can uncover a clearer path forward and live with more purpose and balance.

If you’re based locally and looking for life coaching in Tunbridge Wells, you can learn more about working together here

Support This Work

If this reflection has offered insight or comfort, and you’d like to help sustain this work and help make coaching accessible to others, you’re welcome to contribute here.

Support Spirit Bear ☕ →

How Coaching with Cards Transforms Sessions

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AngelI’ve always been interested in how cards can be used in coaching sessions, some directly and in-directly.

In my personal practice I normally work on a new client about 30 mins before they arrive not necessarily knowing what the problem is yet. One of the first things I do is draw an angel card and I see how this relates to the client’s issue that day, but without telling them about the cards during the session. I’ve been working like this for the last 23 years. I think of it as observational research and the cards always without fail relates to the clients situation in some way. Cards have been a great aid for asking insightful coaching questions that then lead to very creative and resourceful sessions.

Recently for a new client, I drew the angel card of Fun, next I pulled the Trickster from the Native American Path cards, which is also as it happens to be about laughing at the realisation of the crooked path one is on and not to be so serious. The next card I pulled from the Medicine Cards deck was Beaver, which is about working hard and working together. I then let it be to see what opened up during the coaching session.

During the session he mentioned social anxiety (not working together), he was retired and wanted to use his time more effectively but didn’t know what to do with his time, but wanted fun. He also mentioned that he got frustrated with others and gave the example of road rage that he gets. So anger became our first piece of change work that session, as the anger also affected his personal relationship with his partner.

When he left, guess what his personalised car number plate was? Ans: FUN

‘Walk in Peace;

Walk in Beauty’

— Spirit Bear Coaching

Click here for Johnathan’s LinkedIn

Support This Work

If this reflection has offered insight or comfort, and you’d like to help sustain this work and help make coaching accessible to others, you’re welcome to contribute here.

Support Spirit Bear ☕ →

Reflection Archives – Spirit Bear Coaching

Reflection Archives – Spirit Bear Coaching

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The Law of Attraction In A Nutshell

‘Purposeful Manifestation Through Focusing’

jeremy-bishop-194141-unsplash

When the book and subsequent movie of The Secret came out, people everywhere were buzzing about its revelation: the Law of Attraction. Revealed as the key to the prolific success of some of history’s greatest minds, like Michelangelo and Thomas Jefferson, the Law of Attraction is a powerful insight into the workings of nature that can be consciously, intentional used as a tool for manifestation. A tool whose ideas underlie many, if not most, other manifestation processes.

As big a “secret” as it may be (or rather, may once have been) it is actually quite a simple concept to understand. It is divided into three steps for manifesting, or “attracting”, anything you want into your life. Those three steps are as follows:

1.      Ask
2.      Accept
3.      Allow

Now let’s break these steps down for you, one at a time.

1. Ask

To have what you want, you first must know what you want. Asking is a process of letting the universe know what you want. And maybe even more importantly, letting it know that you know what you want.

Why is this important? Because in doing so, you’re generating a very clear and decisive energy. The source likes that. The clearer and more definitive, the better. Because it is that clarity of vision of knowing what you want, coupled with the singularity of desire that comes from asking for it that targets the “object” of your desire with laser-point accuracy.

2. Accept

Most people have some experience with step 1. Whether in prayer or goal-setting, most of you reading this have already at one time or another asked for what you want. Many of us also know (some, all to well) the experience of asking for what we want and not getting it. That is because asking for it is only the 1st step of the process, and many people either stop here or worse, take actions completely counterproductive to the law of attraction. We ask for what we want, then we promptly, clumsily get in our own way and thwart it’s manifestation.

What actions? Those they display doubt and uncertainty about getting those goals met. Like whining and fretting and complaining about “not having” it yet. Like worrying about your future should you not get it, or worse taking actions that imagine it not happening instead of taking actions that imagine success.

That’s where steps 2 and 3 come into the picture.

Step 2, or Accept, could also be called Receive, because it’s about trusting that your request was heard, and more, that it’s been granted. It’s the meaning of “Ask and ye shall Receive”: that in the asking, you instantaneously set in motion a cycle of energetic events that has the object of your desire already on its way to you.

So what do you do? You sit back and relax, content in the knowledge that your request has been heard and granted and you can move onto other things. If you don’t, and you constantly obsess over this thing you want to manifest, then you’re showing the universe that you don’t really believe it’s coming. You push it away with your distrust of the process instead of accepting that it’s on its way.

3. Allow

The other way we push the manifestation of our desires away is with a sense of undeserving-ness. We don’t act like we get what we want in life, so our life produces evidence of that. But if we act like we get what we want in life, our life produces evidence of that. We must Allow the fulfillment of our wishes to come into our life by creating the energy that supports their existence.

And the way that we do that is by feeling inside what it’s like (not what it would be like, but what it is like) to have the fulfillment of your desires here and now. If step 2 is about Knowing, step 3 is about Feeling. You must exude the energy of someone who’s living as if their next fulfilment is on its way, like a houseguest. You need do nothing but prepare your home for their arrival.

Live life purposefully manifesting, through focusing!

’til we meet again,

Walk in Peace;
Walk in Beauty.

signature

 

‘Causing the Miraculous by Spreading Beauty, Truth & Harmony‘

Johnathan Brooks, MAC, PG Dip is a Cognitive Behavioural Coach who has trained in a wide range of personal development treatment methods including the “Power Therapies” (CBT Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (postgrad), EFT Emotional Freedom Technique, Master NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming) and has a Post Graduate Diploma in ‘Coaching and NLP’ which he passed with a ‘Commendation’.

He is a full member of the Association for Coaching (MAC) and is a Gold member of The Professional Guild of NLP.

Why we shouldn’t celebrate Osama Bin Ladin’s death?

We are One….deep down in our shadow self, there may be a part of us all that is part Osama.

If you believe in Oneness one can’t pick and choose which we’re one with and which one we’re not. Perhaps he reflected mans lack of ‘Brotherhood’. Either case, there’s little point in popping Champaign. One needs to go deeper in much the same way in Germany’s role in the ‘shadow of Europe’ twice!

Why does one need to mourn or celebrate? The only thing people should ask themselves is: How does this affect me? If Osama is a reflection of me (in some way), is there a part of me that is a bit fanatical? And if so, how can I neutralise it?

We can’t have Peace in the world until you have Peace within us first. People that celebrate the death are not seeing the whole picture the ‘complete change’ into the Compassionate Age.

Those that celebrate are coming from the old reactionary state are stuck in the old ideas of retribution, an eye for an eye, but that just makes people blind.

Jung said that (and he wasn’t the only one) only when there is nothing else you can do then you let go and let in the Higher energies. Let go meaning letting go of our personality Self to have it our way only. I’ll leave that for your own interpretation as to what he meant by Higher energies.

Accept Archives – Spirit Bear Coaching

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The Law of Attraction In A Nutshell

January 4, 2013 By Johnathan

‘Purposeful Manifestation Through Focusing’

When the book and subsequent movie of The Secret came out, people everywhere were buzzing about its revelation: the Law of Attraction. Revealed as the key to the prolific success of some of history’s greatest minds, like Michelangelo and Thomas Jefferson, the Law of Attraction is a powerful insight into the workings of nature that can be consciously, intentional used as a tool for manifestation. A tool whose ideas underlie many, if not most, other manifestation processes.

As big a “secret” as it may be (or rather, may once have been) it is actually quite a simple concept to understand. It is divided into three steps for manifesting, or “attracting”, anything you want into your life. Those three steps are as follows:

1.      Ask
2.      Accept
3.      Allow

Now let’s break these steps down for you, one at a time.

1. Ask

To have what you want, you first must know what you want. Asking is a process of letting the universe know what you want. And maybe even more importantly, letting it know that you know what you want.

Why is this important? Because in doing so, you’re generating a very clear and decisive energy. The source likes that. The clearer and more definitive, the better. Because it is that clarity of vision of knowing what you want, coupled with the singularity of desire that comes from asking for it that targets the “object” of your desire with laser-point accuracy.

2. Accept

Most people have some experience with step 1. Whether in prayer or goal-setting, most of you reading this have already at one time or another asked for what you want. Many of us also know (some, all to well) the experience of asking for what we want and not getting it. That is because asking for it is only the 1st step of the process, and many people either stop here or worse, take actions completely counterproductive to the law of attraction. We ask for what we want, then we promptly, clumsily get in our own way and thwart it’s manifestation.

What actions? Those they display doubt and uncertainty about getting those goals met. Like whining and fretting and complaining about “not having” it yet. Like worrying about your future should you not get it, or worse taking actions that imagine it not happening instead of taking actions that imagine success.

That’s where steps 2 and 3 come into the picture.

Step 2, or Accept, could also be called Receive, because it’s about trusting that your request was heard, and more, that it’s been granted. It’s the meaning of “Ask and ye shall Receive”: that in the asking, you instantaneously set in motion a cycle of energetic events that has the object of your desire already on its way to you.

So what do you do? You sit back and relax, content in the knowledge that your request has been heard and granted and you can move onto other things. If you don’t, and you constantly obsess over this thing you want to manifest, then you’re showing the universe that you don’t really believe it’s coming. You push it away with your distrust of the process instead of accepting that it’s on its way.

3. Allow

The other way we push the manifestation of our desires away is with a sense of undeserving-ness. We don’t act like we get what we want in life, so our life produces evidence of that. But if we act like we get what we want in life, our life produces evidence of that. We must Allow the fulfillment of our wishes to come into our life by creating the energy that supports their existence.

And the way that we do that is by feeling inside what it’s like (not what it would be like, but what it is like) to have the fulfillment of your desires here and now. If step 2 is about Knowing, step 3 is about Feeling. You must exude the energy of someone who’s living as if their next fulfilment is on its way, like a houseguest. You need do nothing but prepare your home for their arrival.

Live life purposefully manifesting, through focusing!

’til we meet again,

Walk in Peace;
Walk in Beauty.

signature

 

‘Causing the Miraculous by Spreading Beauty, Truth & Harmony‘

Johnathan Brooks, MAC, PG Dip is a Cognitive Behavioural Coach who has trained in a wide range of personal development treatment methods including the “Power Therapies” (CBT Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (postgrad), EFT Emotional Freedom Technique, Master NLP Neuro Linguistic Programming) and has a Post Graduate Diploma in ‘Coaching and NLP’ which he passed with a ‘Commendation’.

He is a full member of the Association for Coaching (MAC) and is a Gold member of The Professional Guild of NLP.