Becoming a Professional Life Coach – Patrick Williams and Diane Menendez

With his bestselling Therapist as Life Coach, Pat Williams introduced the therapeutic community to the career of life coaching. Now, Williams, founder of the Institute for Life Coach Training (ILCT), and Menendez, senior trainer at ILCT—both master certified coaches extraordinaire—reveal all the basic principles and crucial strategies that they have taught to thousands of coaches over the years. 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 strategies for being an effective, 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 within clients;
• Helping clients to identify and fulfill core values, and much, much more.

REVIEWS:

Being a truly effective ally of another person requires us to know both what to do and how to be; Becoming a Professional Life Coach gives us both. While the task of creating a comprehensive training text on the broad field of life coaching is quite daunting, Patrick Williams and Diane Menendez take it on with what appears to be real joy and they master it. The reader is both instructed and inspired cover to cover. The challenge of doing more than producing another coaching “cookbook” is met and exceeded with an excellent integration of both practical technique and well grounded theory.

Becoming a Professional Life Coach integrates what is sometimes missing in much coach training, such as Prochaska’s Stage of Readiness For Change. The book takes terms which have become well-worn catch phrases, such as fulfillment and empowerment, and infuses them with new life, helping the coach to truly understand their meaning, importance and their use. Becoming a Professional Life Coach will become the touchstone in the field of training life coaches. Michael Arloski, Ph.D., PCC, author of Wellness Coaching For Lasting Lifestyle Change.