Many people assume that spirituality is linked closely to religion, but in reality, its intention is to help you identify and live your purpose in life.
In recent years, professionals from all walks of life have found that spirituality can help them in both personal and professional settings. Now, more and more people turn to spirituality to help them realize their goals.
But as a relatively new concept, there is still some confusion about what spiritual life coaching can help with, and how spiritual coaches help and inspire their clients.
What Is A Spiritual Life Coach?
A coach is a person who helps you get where you want to go.
So, a spiritual coach is a person who helps you get where you want to go—spiritually.
A spiritual life coach helps you cut through your confusion and gain insight into yourself. Therefore, you shed burdens with a good coach by recognizing deeply rooted limiting beliefs, and focusing on personal growth. Also, a spiritual coach helps you identify and achieve your true purpose in life—that for which you live, and in which you find deep and lasting meaning.
When confusion dissipates, clarity appears. So, the initial reason for working with a coach is simple: to see and to understand.
If you look at your life and don’t like what you see, you’ll naturally seek to change it.
In the process of changing, it’s easy to become tangled up in over-thinking, false assumptions, and old ways of looking at things.
A good coach helps you clarify your thoughts, gain insight, and set actions to achieve your desired outcome.
What Do Spiritual Coaches Do?
In essence, a spiritual coach helps you set spiritual goals.
These goals can include determining your values, cultivating self-knowledge, generating insight about a relationship, or clarifying your purpose in life —sometimes in the form of a single word: Courage. Creativity. Community. Virtue. Justice. Compassion.
To achieve this, spiritual life coaches have a number of techniques and exercises they use to help their clients.
Creating a Life Plan
A spiritual coach helps you create and stay accountable to a life plan.
It’s no small endeavor to investigate your mind—to sort out the conscious and unconscious views and paradigms by which you live—and purposefully arrange your life in alignment with only those spiritual principles for which you have decided to exist.
A spiritual coach understands the importance of this process for the creation of a meaningful human life. To be clear and specific about the principles by which you live makes it possible for you to realize a fulfilling plan for life while developing the power to live it.
Accountability Structures
A spiritual life coach holds clients responsible for living according to their principles and goals with different accountability structures.
Sometimes it’s hard to get started with spiritual, creative work because even though such endeavors often yield long-term prosperity, they appear, in the short term, to have no return on investment, and, therefore, run counter to profit-oriented culture.
This, of course, is not the case, because creative projects often succeed, sustained as they are by passion and grit.
A spiritual coach guides you through the initial phases of spiritual reflection and creativity as you work your way to freedom and financial success—two important aims of spiritual and creative work that go hand in hand.
Active Listening and Powerful Questions
A coach leads you to insight with active listening and powerful questions. Also, the coach will recognize, underscore, and celebrate constructive elements that openly exist in your life, but that you may have overlooked.
A coach’s ability to highlight your virtues is a powerful vehicle for transformation, allowing you to see treasures that you already have, even though you didn’t know they existed.
Reframing Experiences
The life coach challenges a client’s mindset and can help you reframe your understanding of yourself and situation.
A coach can help you drop negative beliefs and blinders that prevent you from seeing possibilities or taking action. Or help bring you to a more grounded, feasible sense of simplicity, focus, and realistic activity.
Opening 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.
How Do Spiritual Life Coaches Help People Overcome Their Issues?
There are many ways a spiritual life coach can help a person.
By focusing on positive, creative, action, a coach helps a client to naturally reconnect with what’s important to you in life. Working with a spiritual coach can help you reconnect to your intuition, restore trust and confidence in your intelligence, expose blind spots, and take powerful action.
Here are some ways they may do this:
Finding Your Essence
Finding the essence of a person and naming it in one word sounds simple, but it involves an exhaustive interview process where the coach works with their client through a historical accounting of their major life events.
When clients find their word, the word becomes a powerful tool for cutting through life’s clutter.
Journaling
Journaling allows for a level of orderly introspection and reflection you can’t attain in conventional working life and leads to insight and healing.
In addition, it provides a kind of mental hygiene, helping you to improve your mood by prioritizing and taking control of your fears, problems and concerns.
Overcoming Negativity Bias
A spiritually untrained mind defaults to negativity.
This is why music is played in hotels and department stores – to keep your mind occupied and to make you less likely to think bad thoughts about the environment.
Though being hard-wired for negativity helps you survive, such programming gets in the way when you want to stay productive, reach a positive ‘unimaginable’ goal, rest, or savor life.
A spiritual life coach may give you positive psychology exercises like Three Good Things, to help keep you optimistic, creative, and prolific.
Meditation
A Spiritual Life coach may use contemplative practices, like meditation to help you connect with focused, healing energy.
Mediation can also be prescribed for a specific purpose around a desired outcome.
Discussing Readings
Dialogue about reading is a brilliant way to learn and come to insight about yourself.
For example, a coach may ask their client to read and discuss Aristotle’s notion of Virtue, with an aim toward having a client define what Virtue looks like for them in daily life.
Identifying Core Values
People feel most stuck and dysfunctional when asked to do something that contradicts their values, so knowing what your values are is necessary for taking action and living a fulfilling human life.
“Who do I have to be in order to do what I want to do?” is the kind of question you might explore with your coach.
What Can A Spiritual Life Coach Help Me With?
A spiritual life coach can help clients focus on any personal or human issue in such a way that your issue deepens into you with both universal and individual purpose. In this way, you generate a meaningful life.
A spiritual coach can help with a number of things, including:
- Identifying and realizing your spiritual goals
- Balancing material needs with your spiritual goals
- Finding direction and purpose in life
- Envisioning how you see yourself living in five years
- Performing at your highest potential and finding your best self
- Identify core values
- Identify driving passion and what you are willing to die for
- Answering the question “Who am I?”
- Finding a single word that describes the essence of your being and everything that you stand for in everything that you do
- Discover what you want to be remembered for
- Find your passion project and how you want to use your precious life
Spiritual Life Coach vs Therapists: What’s the Difference?
There’s still a lot of confusion about the difference between Spiritual Life Coaches and Therapists, and whether or not they work with clients to achieve the same thing.
Therapists generally focus on the past and fixing something that’s broken, but a life coach is more focused on the future and creating and taking action.
A spiritual life coach helps you to consider what you want your life to look like when it’s based on spiritual values and fulfillment, helping you take action to make creative changes to the way you live.
The Bottom Line
Although coaching is a relatively new profession in the western world, the concept of coaching has been around for centuries.
Working with a spiritual life coach can be useful to overcome a number of issues life throws at us, from feeling dissatisfied in your career, to suffering from feelings of insecurity and self-doubt, or wondering what your life’s purpose is.
If you feel like something is missing from your life, but aren’t quite able to put your finger on the cause, it could be worth finding a spiritual life coach you can work with to see whether or not you could benefit from being more spiritual.
