More than just fixing what ails them, many therapists today seek to help clients achieve personal and professional goals and navigate life changes successfully-a variety of practice called life coaching. This book offers a complete strategy professionals can use to incorporate life coaching into their practices. Becoming a Life Coach compares the role of the therapist to that of the life coach; the role of the patient to that of the client; the service of the mentally ill to that of the mentally healthy; treatment to collaboration; and finally the differences in professional standing between these two endeavors. Using real coaching exercises, the book teaches therapists everything they need to know to start and maintain a successful coaching practice. It includes information about necessary skills, tips on integrating coaching and therapy, business models, marketing advice, and more.

In 2006, U.S. News and World Report listed coaching as one of the 10 top growing professions. The first edition of Therapist as Life Coach, published in 2002, anticipated this trend, and since its publication it has become a standard for therapists who wish to transition or expand their practices into life coaching. Pat Williams and Deborah C. Davis have finally revised their classic practice-building book for today's therapists and future coaches. Every chapter in this second edition has been updated and rewritten, reflecting the growth of the coaching field and its increasing appeal to not only therapists, but all helping professionals. The book begins by exploring the history of the coaching movement and shows how society is hungry for life coaches. The second part of the book explains in detail the differences and similarities between coaching and therapy, discusses the coaching relationship, and considers some of the skills therapists will need to learn and unlearn in order to reclaim their joyfulness about their work. Professional transition tools such as developing and marketing your practice and honing your coaching skills are discussed at length in Part Three. The final section moves beyond basic life coaching to introduce coaching specialties such as corporate coaching, offers self-care strategies for life coaches, and peeks into the future of life coaching. There is new material throughout, including an overview of recent coaching developments, updated liability concerns, new business opportunities, and a new section on the research about coaching. Coaching gives practitioners the opportunity to break free of managed care and excessive reliance on the insurance industry and to work with a wide range of clients—specifically, those who are not suffering from mental illness but, rather, seeking to maximize their life potential. This book will help you enter this lucrative and personally enriching world with the skills and knowledge you need to build a successful coaching practice.

An updated version of the best-selling therapist-to-coach transition text. With his bestselling Therapist As Life Coach, Pat Williams introduced the therapeutic community to the career of life coach, and in Becoming a Professional Life Coach he and Diane Menendez covered all the basic principles and strategies for effective coaching. Now Williams, founder of the Institute for Life Coach Training (ILCT), and Menendez, former faculty at ILCT—both master certified coaches—bring back the book that has taught thousands of coaches over the past eight years with all-new information on coaching competencies, ethics, somatic coaching, wellness coaching, and how positive psychology and neuroscience are informing the profession today. Moving seamlessly from coaching fundamentals—listening skills, effective language, session preparation—to more advanced ideas such as helping clients to identify life purpose, recognize and combat obstacles, align values and actions, maintain a positive mind-set, and live with integrity, this new edition is one-stop-shopping for beginner and advanced coaches alike. Beginning with a brief history of the foundations of coaching and its future trajectory, Becoming a Professional Life Coach takes readers step-by-step through the coaching process, covering all the crucial ideas and techniques for being a successful life coach, including: • Listening to, versus listening for, versus listening with • Establishing a client’s focus • Giving honest feedback and observation • Formulating first coaching conversations • Asking powerful, eliciting questions • Understanding human developmental issues • Reframing a client’s perspective • Enacting change with clients • Helping clients to identify and fulfill core values, and much, much more. All the major skillsets for empowering and “stretching” clients are covered. By filling the pages with client exercises, worksheets, sample dialogues, and self-assessments, Williams and Menendez give readers a hands-on coaching manual to expertly guide their clients to purposeful, transformative lives. Today, with more and more therapists incorporating coaching into their practices, and the number of master certified coaches, many with niche expertise, growing every year, Becoming a Professional Life Coach fills a greater need than ever. By tackling the nuts and bolts of coaching, Williams and Menendez equip readers with the tools and techniques they need to make a difference in their clients’ lives.

Tackling relationships, career, and family issues, John Kim, LMFT, thinks of himself as a life-styledesigner, not a therapist. His radical new approach, that he sometimes calls “self-help in a shot glass” is easy, real, and to the point. He helps people make changes to their lives so that personal growth happens organically, just by living. Let’s face it, therapy is a luxury. Few of us have the time or money to devote to going to an office every week. With anecdotes illustrating principles in action (in relatable and sometimes irreverent fashion) and stand-alone practices and exercises, Kim gives readers the tools and directions to focus on what's right with them instead of what's wrong. When John Kim was going through the end of a relationship, he began blogging as The Angry Therapist, documenting his personal journey post-divorce. Traditional therapists avoid transparency, but Kim preferred the language of "me too" as opposed to "you should." He blogged about his own shortcomings, revelations, views on relationships, and the world. He spoke a different therapeutic language —open, raw, and at times subversive — and people responded. The Angry Therapist blog, that inspired this book, has been featured in The Atlantic Monthly and on NPR.

At last, a book for mental health professionals considering a transition into the new and dynamic field of life coaching! Therapist as Life Coach explores life coaching as a profession, examines the relationship between life coaching and therapy, and details the variety of options for professionals considering either a transition into coaching or expanding their practices to include coaching.This book is one-stop-shopping for the therapist wishing to explore the coaching field. Chapters include: The History and Evolution of Life Coaching; Therapy and Coaching: Distinctions and Similarities; Getting Started as a Life Coach; The Basic Life Coaching Model; Developing and Marketing Your Life Coaching Practice; Self-Care for Life Coaches.

BRAVE THINKING is the culmination of more than 40 years of study, and 30 years of teaching this technology of transformation. People struggle with relationships. They struggle with money. They struggle with health. I’ve been coaching first as a minister, then for the last decade as a trainer outside the church world. But teaching, studying, and working in this laboratory called life. I’ve been both a student, and I’ve been a trainer in this laboratory, helping people unlock what it is they would love to have, be, do, give in their life. And helping them understand their capacity to do this. To use brave thinking and tap into the field of infinite possibility, potentiality, and work with a particular dream vision for their lives, so they can begin to see the pattern. Because once you see the pattern of how thoughts become things and how you can take what looks like very little and translate it into something much more – it’s as different as moving from simple addition to squaring in math. When you are working with simple addition, the only way to get to 25 is you must amass 25 ones. When you learn to multiply you find that you only need two 5’s to get to that same result. It takes way less effort and you have way more results. And when you move up the ladder of awareness a little bit further, you see you only need one 5. Brave Thinking will help people recognize that they have everything they need to live a life they love living, and a life that really has meaning and purpose and substance and significance. And I know how to do that. I know how to help them. BRAVE THINKING provides the code to a very different kind of thinking. Either one opens the doors to a potential that is something we are in love with, or something we fear. The purpose of this book is to provide very concrete direct clear simple understandings. Such as the world was flat or other kinds of commonplace thinking and help them recognize how much of that has governed their lives or the lives of people they know. It will show examples of people who dared to think beyond the boundaries of ordinary thinking and who dared to learn a new system of thinking. Rather than being condition based in a way of living life, they began to live a life that is vision-driven. And they came from a vision rather than living from circumstance. Most people think that when the circumstances change, ¡§then I can make a new decision, “then I can have something” “then I can be something,” “then I can do something.” What if it’s just the opposite? When you watch your television, and there are other common examples we’ll use, when you turn on a TV, the picture you are seeing comes from the frequency that your tuner is tuned to. And when you go to a movie theater, the dancing images on the screen are simply reflections of the light passing through the film that’s held before the projector.

Total Life Coaching by Pat and Lloyd is more than just a book. It is an interactive experience in which you will find recipes for living your life more authentically, as well as master time-honored lessons that you can bring to your coaching clients. Regardless of the personal coaching techniques or skills you may have learned, you may still not be the most effective coach you can become. This book will help you move closer to that goal. Life coaching is more than a collection of techniques and skills. It is more than something you do. Life coaching reflects who you are-it is your authentic being in action.Readers of Pat Williams's and Deborah Davis's book, Therapist as Life Coach, know Pat to be a gifted life coach and passionate teacher. Here Pat and colleague and writer, Lloyd J. Thomas, build on this earlier book and share a unique insight into the coaching process, which shows you precisely how to enhance your professional practices through practical and effective life coaching. It also empowers you to change your own lives through use of the practical information and philosophy presented here. Total Life Coaching is organized into a series of 50 life lessons, and is designed to be either read cover-to-cover or dipped into, as needed, for assistance when conducting a coaching session. Keeping life's processes on the "message and lesson" level makes living and life coaching much easier and more enjoyable. Total Life Coaching guides you step-by-step through the complex process of learning and coaching these fifty important lessons. The lessons are organized into 8 sections: Creating a Personal Identity; Coaching Spirituality and Life Purpose; Coaching Communication Skills; Living Life with Integrity; Success: Clients Achieving their Potential; Coaching Cognitive Skills; Creating High-Quality Relationships; Understanding Your Past to Create a Desired Future.Each lesson is presented as a structured recipe and includes: The life lesson The messages contained within the lesson Coaching objectives for your clients regarding the lesson What you need to know about the lesson to provide the framework for coaching it Coaching methods, exercises, questions, and language for bringing each lesson to your clients Sample coaching conversations that exemplify the coach-client dialogue for the coaching of the lesson.