Life Coaching
Life Coaching With the Depth of Therapy
Sometimes you don’t need therapy because something is terribly wrong. You need help figuring out what you want, why you haven’t been able to get there, and what needs to change.
That’s where life coaching can be enormously useful.
At New Jersey Therapy and Life Coaching, our approach to coaching is different from what you may find elsewhere. We are not motivational speakers who became coaches after taking a short certification course. We are mental health professionals who understand people, relationships, behavior, motivation, anxiety, self-defeating patterns, and the complicated reasons people sometimes remain stuck even when they know exactly what they want to change.
That background matters.
Life coaching at NJTLC combines the forward movement of coaching with the depth and understanding that come from years of working with people as therapists. The goal isn’t to spend every session examining your past. It is to understand enough about what is happening in your life to help you move forward intelligently.
You May Not Need Therapy. You May Need a Plan.
People come to life coaching for all kinds of reasons.
You may be doing reasonably well but know that something in your life needs to change. You may have reached a point in your career where you are successful but no longer satisfied. You may be considering leaving a job, starting a business, changing careers, retiring, ending a relationship, beginning another one, or making a decision that could alter the next ten years of your life.
Or perhaps nothing dramatic has happened at all.
You simply feel stuck.
You have ideas you never act on. You procrastinate. You repeatedly make plans and abandon them. You have been telling yourself for three years that you’re going to make a change, but three years have gone by and you’re still thinking about it.
Life coaching gives that process structure.
Together, we figure out what you actually want, identify what is getting in the way, and begin turning intentions into decisions and decisions into action.
Life Coaching for Career, Relationships and Major Life Decisions
Life is rarely divided into neat categories.
A career problem affects your relationship. A relationship affects your confidence. Anxiety affects a business decision. Financial concerns affect whether you’re willing to make a career change. What looks like procrastination may really be fear of failure—or fear of succeeding and discovering that the thing you wanted doesn’t make you happy after all.
That is why good coaching requires more than goal setting.
At NJTLC, life coaching may focus on:
* Career changes and professional direction
* Starting or growing a business
* Leadership and workplace challenges
* Retirement and planning what comes next
* Major personal and financial decisions
* Relationships and dating
* Divorce and rebuilding your life afterward
* Confidence and assertiveness
* Motivation and procrastination
* Work-life balance
* Personal goals that continually get postponed
* Feeling successful on paper but dissatisfied in real life
* Finding direction during periods of transition
* Creating a more satisfying personal and professional life
Some clients come with a very specific decision to make. Others simply know they are unhappy with the way some part of their life is going.
Both are perfectly reasonable places to begin.
The Difference Between Life Coaching and Therapy
Therapy and life coaching overlap, but they are not the same thing.
Psychotherapy treats emotional and psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, trauma, grief and other mental health concerns. Therapy may involve understanding past experiences, emotional patterns and relationships as part of relieving psychological distress and creating change.
Life coaching is generally more focused on where you are now and where you want to go.
The central questions become:
What do you want?
What’s preventing you from getting there?
And what are you going to do about it?
There are times when the distinction is obvious. Someone struggling with significant depression needs therapy, not a pep talk and a list of goals. Someone who is emotionally healthy but trying to decide whether to leave a twenty-year career may benefit tremendously from coaching.
There are also plenty of people who fall somewhere in between.
And that is one of the advantages of working with professionals who understand both.
When Therapy and Life Coaching Meet
For many of our clients, therapy and life coaching naturally go hand in hand.
You might begin by working on a career change and discover that fear or anxiety has repeatedly kept you from taking risks. You might come in because you want a better relationship and realize there are longstanding patterns affecting the partners you choose. You may know exactly what you need to do professionally but continue sabotaging yourself every time an opportunity appears.
We don’t need to force those experiences into separate boxes.
Sometimes the work is therapeutic. Sometimes it is coaching. Often it is both.
What matters is understanding what is actually preventing change and helping you do something about it.
That combination is at the heart of New Jersey Therapy and Life Coaching.
Why Work With a Therapist and Life Coach?
The term life coach can mean almost anything.
There is no single educational path required to use the title, and coaches can come from enormously different backgrounds. Some are excellent. Some have substantial professional experience. Others have considerably less.
Our approach grew out of decades of professional work helping people understand themselves, change behavior, improve relationships, make difficult decisions and create more satisfying lives.
Dr. Larry Cohen has worked as a therapist and life coach for more than 30 years. His background also includes behavioral-health research, university teaching and an NIMH Fellowship in Mental Health Research at the University of Chicago.
Over those years, therapy and coaching have rarely existed as completely separate worlds. Many clients need some of each.
That’s the difference we bring to coaching.
We don’t simply ask where you want to go.
We also want to understand why you haven’t gotten there already.
Life Coaching Doesn’t Mean Someone Runs Your Life
A good life coach doesn’t make your decisions for you.
We won’t tell you whether to quit your job, get divorced, move to California, retire early or start the company you’ve been talking about for ten years.
Those are your decisions.
Our job is to help you think more clearly about them.
That means challenging assumptions, recognizing patterns, considering consequences, separating realistic concerns from fear, identifying alternatives you may not have considered, and being candid when the things you say you want don’t match the things you are actually doing.
Life coaching is collaborative, but it isn’t passive.
The point is change.
Life Coaching for People Who Are Already Successful
You do not have to be falling apart to ask for help.
In fact, many people who benefit most from coaching are functioning quite well.
They have careers. Relationships. Families. Responsibilities. They may be professionally accomplished and financially comfortable. From the outside, their lives look fine.
But fine isn’t necessarily the same thing as satisfying.
Success can also create its own problems. Once you’ve achieved the things you were supposed to achieve, you may find yourself asking a surprisingly difficult question:
Now what?
Life coaching can provide a place to examine that question seriously rather than pushing it aside for another five years.
Individual, Relationship and Professional Coaching
Life coaching isn’t limited to individual personal goals.
We also work with clients around relationships, communication, professional development, career decisions and major life transitions.
For couples, coaching can sometimes be appropriate when the primary issue isn’t a troubled marriage but rather a decision or transition the couple needs to navigate together.
For professionals and business owners, coaching may concentrate more heavily on decision-making, leadership, communication, priorities, career direction and the inevitable overlap between professional success and personal life.
The work is tailored to the person in front of us. There is no coaching curriculum that everybody marches through.
In-Person and Online Life Coaching
New Jersey Therapy and Life Coaching has offices in Voorhees, Marlton and Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and life-coaching sessions are also available by video and phone.
Online coaching makes geography much less important. You can meet from home, from your office or, as more than a few of our clients have discovered, from a parked car between everything else they have to do.
Coaching arrangements outside New Jersey can also be discussed. Psychotherapy is a regulated healthcare service and is provided subject to applicable professional licensing requirements.
Maybe It’s Time to Stop Thinking About It
Most significant changes begin long before someone actually makes them.
You think about leaving the job.
You think about starting the business.
You think about fixing the relationship.
You think about finally doing the thing you keep telling yourself matters.
Thinking is useful.
Eventually, though, something has to happen.
If there is something in your personal or professional life that you have been trying to change—or something you haven’t been able to figure out on your own—life coaching may be a good place to start.
Call New Jersey Therapy and Life Coaching at (856) 352-5428 or contact us to schedule a life-coaching consultation.
In-person appointments are available in Voorhees, Marlton and Cherry Hill, NJ, with online and phone appointments also available.
New Jersey Therapy and Life Coaching
Therapy when you need therapy. Coaching when you need coaching. And often, a little of both.Home Blog