Life Coaching Handbook: Everything You Need to be an Effective Life Coach

This book offers useful approaches to be considered when setting up a business, and provides an overview of some useful NLP techniques.

As someone who coached staff in the 1980s, and Clients using NLP techniques, I welcome new ideas. It is well written, with attention grabbing metaphors comparing coaching to “motorway maintenance and construction filling in the ruts of life” and “NLP – a minestrone soup of techniques for change”. Interestingly the soup course forms the second half of the book, yet it is at a cocktail level leaving you hungry for a full meal.
Hints and techniques are shared logically that will assist coaches as a business proposition. Yet I started to get uncomfortable, and then more so when Curly indicated she considers health to be her “responsibility to encourage Clients” as their ‘guardian’. Perhaps it was my Covid stone making me feel uneasy.
Curly “would refuse to work with a Client and immediately issue a full refund” if the Client did not return their comprehensive internal analysis and I had to do some soul searching, before embracing my softer more compassionate approach. I am not interested in ‘having a 100% success rate’, or whether my ‘reputation is negatively affected’ by someone failing to return a form. And I don’t agree that my “morale, motivation and self-belief will need constant boosting if I were to work with a Client who lacks such commitment”.
I consider one of my biggest achievements during lockdown was assisting a young Kenyan woman, with suicidal ideations. This wasn’t a time for me to talk fees or forms. My model of the world also allows for Clients to text if they need additional coaching; something I can’t see Curly advocating.
So this book offers useful approaches to be considered when setting up a business, and provides an overview of some useful NLP techniques. Yet it could do with an update as it was published in 2001.