The Academic Life Coaching Relationship
Academic Life Coaching is a specialized area of life coaching that includes specific added training in coaching young people still in school (secondary school, university).
As your coach, my job is to work in partnership with you to discover your personal strengths & inspirations. We will also identify areas for growth to help you set and achieve goals that move your life forward with balance.
What Academic Life Coaching Is All About
Success in school and in life depends on mastering a range of important personal skills. These include:
- discovering the passions & inspirations that spark joy
- understanding your motivations; managing time
- organizing & prioritizing
- setting achievable goals
- communicating effectively
- making intentional choices
Unfortunately, these are not skills that are taught in most school settings. Academic Life Coaching is designed to help you understand and develop these skills.
What Academic Life Coaching Is Not
Academic Life Coaching is not counseling, consulting, or mentoring. All of these practices have a place and a purpose and they share some commonalities, but they are also quite different from each other.
I’ll try to illustrate with an example: imagine that you are at the bottom of a tall mountain thinking about climbing it. A counselor or therapist might work with you to uncover your motivations for wanting to climb the mountain and she might also explore things that happened in your past that are keeping you from climbing the mountain. A consultant would speak to you as an expert in mountain climbing and would tell you exactly how to climb the mountain. A mentor would tell you how he climbed the mountain successfully and would suggest a plan. In a coaching relationship we would look at all the different possible routes and strategies together and I would help you to figure out which would be the best option for you at this time.
How it works
I meet with you on a regular basis, either in person or via videoconference. During our time together we identify an area that you want to work on. We then explore its importance and the roadblocks that might exist. We finish off by establish some measurable goals to work toward and some strategies to achieve those goals before our next session. I generally recommend a minimum of 10 sessions (not including your FREE introductory session), but that is strictly up to you.