Let me answer that question by way of a metaphor, one that you’ll find on my website and business cards. I think that everybody can move "from bud to blossom to bloom" given the right conditions. What I mean by this phrase is that we can all bring to full realization our own innate potential. We just need to tend it and cultivate it. What the full “bloom” of a person’s potential looks like at any given moment changes over time and varies from one person to another. Maybe your potential is best realized through building a small business from the ground up. Maybe it’s dramatically improving your athletic performance, starting the novel you always dreamt of writing, working through a difficult relationship, or learning to speak in public. Maybe it’s something you can’t quite put your finger on. Only you know what it means for you to fully bloom.

 

A good life coach is a bit like gardener with a green thumb. They understand that the bud of potential needs to be cared for and cultivated to fully open its gifts to the world. To cultivate a plant, you ensure that it receives clean water and sufficient sunlight, that it is rooted in fertile soil, and that the ambient temperature is conducive to growth. But what does it mean to cultivate a human life? And how does a coach help do this? I answer that question in greater detail on my What is Coaching? page, but let me say just a bit more here.

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Cultivating potential isn’t a question of just planting a seed and watching to see if it grows. It is the passionate pursuit of greater self-awareness and accountability followed by tangible, concrete actions.

 

Through dialogue and a healthy dose of open-ended questions, a life coach helps you clarify what is truly important to you and why, not just in a superficial way, but in a deep, gut-level sort of way. As you do this, you start to gain awareness regarding the impact of all the small decisions you make throughout the day. Much of the increased awareness comes by way of unearthing limiting beliefs and behaviors, then developing clearly-defined and intentional attitudes towards them. (That’s how coach and client till the soil, so to speak.) As a result, you begin to change how you think and feel and, most importantly, how you act. No coaching session, to my way of thinking, is complete without a clearly defined action step that the client is expected to take outside of the coaching session. Cultivating potential isn’t a question of just planting a seed and watching to see if it grows. It is the passionate pursuit of greater self-awareness and accountability through dynamic, proactive techniques, followed by tangible, concrete actions.

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