Life Coaching
Forward-facing, practical work for people who are not unwell but are stuck — with a direction to choose, a habit to break, or a version of their life they keep postponing.
Session length
60 minutes
How it runs
In person, online or phone
Typical course
A block of 6–8 sessions
First step
A free 15-minute call
Who this is for
Coaching and therapy overlap in the room and differ in their centre of gravity. Therapy tends to move towards understanding — how something came to be this way, what it means, what it costs. Coaching starts from where you are now and moves forward: what you want, what is in the way, what you are going to do about it, and what happened when you tried.
It suits people who are broadly well and specifically stuck. The obstacle is rarely information. Most people already know they should leave the job, have the conversation, apply for the course or stop saying yes; what they lack is a structure that makes the decision real and someone who will ask about it in a fortnight.
Sessions are direct without being brisk. You will be asked harder questions than your friends will ask, and you will not be talked out of the difficult option simply because it is difficult.
Common ground
Not an exhaustive list, and you do not need a label to book a session. If what you are carrying is not named here, say so on the first call and we will tell you honestly whether this is the right place.
The approach
No single model fits everyone, and nothing here is applied from a manual. These are the established approaches the work draws on, described plainly so you can see what you are agreeing to.
GROW — Goal, Reality, Options, Will — is a structure for a coaching conversation, popularised by John Whitmore. It moves deliberately from what you want, to an honest description of where things actually stand, to a genuinely wide list of options before narrowing, and finally to a specific commitment with a date attached. Its value is that it prevents the conversation from collapsing into either complaint or premature advice.
Borrowed from solution-focused therapy, this approach spends its time on what is already working rather than on the anatomy of the problem. It uses scaling — where are you now on a ten-point scale, what would one point higher look like on a Tuesday — and looks closely at exceptions, the occasions when you did the thing you claim you cannot do. It is quick, concrete, and unusually good at producing a next step.
Drawing on acceptance and commitment principles, this strand gets specific about what you actually care about, as distinct from what you have absorbed from a family, a profession or a peer group. Values are treated as directions rather than destinations, which makes them useful on the days when the goal itself looks unreachable. It is often the piece that explains why a goal you achieved did not feel like anything.
Intention rarely survives contact with a normal week. This part of the work uses if-then planning — deciding in advance the exact situation in which you will act, an approach associated with the psychologist Peter Gollwitzer — alongside deliberately small starting commitments, removing friction, and honest review of what actually happened rather than what you meant to happen. Missed commitments are treated as information about the plan, not as evidence about you.
Which of these gets used, and in what proportion, is decided with you rather than for you. You can ask at any point why a particular approach is being taken, and you should expect a straight answer.
What happens
There are no surprises built into this process. Here is the whole sequence, in order.
A short conversation to hear what you want to work on and to check that coaching is genuinely the right service. If what you describe sounds more like depression, anxiety or unresolved loss, we will say so and talk about therapy instead — that is not a rejection, it is the correct order to do things in.
A longer first session to define the work: what you want to be different in six months, in observable terms; what you have already tried; what has stopped you before; and what success would look like specifically enough that you would recognise it. We agree the number of sessions here rather than leaving it open-ended.
A fortnight is usually the right rhythm — long enough for something to actually happen between appointments, short enough that momentum does not evaporate. Each session reviews what you committed to, works on the current obstacle, and ends with a specific, dated action rather than a general intention.
Around halfway through we stop and look at the evidence. If the goal was wrong, we change it. If the same commitment has now been missed three times, we treat that as data rather than as a character failing and work out what it is telling us. This session is often the most useful in the block.
The block ends with a review of what has changed and a plan you can run without a coach: the structures worth keeping, the early warning signs that you are drifting back, and what you would do about it. Some people return for a single session a few months later; most do not need to.
The line between the two
Coaching assumes a functioning baseline. It works on direction, decisions and follow-through, and it does that well. What it is not designed to do is treat depression, anxiety disorders, trauma or grief — and a goal-setting framework applied to a mental health difficulty tends to leave people feeling that they have failed at something that was never the right task.
It is also worth knowing that life coaching is not a statutorily regulated profession in the United Kingdom. Anyone may use the title. That is one reason this practice keeps the boundary explicit: if what you bring belongs in therapy, we say so at the first call rather than four sessions in.
Plenty of people do both, sequentially — therapy to work through what happened, coaching to build what comes next. Occasionally the two run alongside each other with different focuses. What we would not do is quietly deliver therapy under a coaching heading, or the reverse.
Direction of travel
These are the changes people commonly aim for in this work. They are not promises, and no honest practitioner can guarantee any of them — progress depends on what you bring, what is going on around you, and time.
Coaching is not therapy and it is not a treatment for a mental health condition. It is also not regulated by statute in the UK. If during the work it becomes clear that something therapeutic needs attention first, we will say so and pause or redirect — including to another practitioner or to your GP where that is the right route. Coaching cannot help with a crisis; if you need urgent support, please use the services listed on our urgent help page.
Questions
The things people most often want to know before booking. If yours is not here, ask it on the free call — no question is too small or too awkward.
Therapy generally works towards understanding and relief — of anxiety, low mood, grief, the effects of a difficult past — and is a recognised form of psychological treatment. Coaching starts from a functioning baseline and works on direction, decisions, structure and follow-through. In the room they can look similar, because both involve careful questions and an unusual quality of attention. The difference is what the work is for, and whether the difficulty is best described as a symptom or as a stuck point.
Not by statute. There is no legal restriction on who may call themselves a life coach in the UK, and there is no register you can check in the way that you can for a doctor or a practising solicitor. That is worth knowing before you buy coaching from anyone. It is also why we are explicit about the limits of the service, keep the boundary with therapy clear, and are happy to answer questions about training and supervision arrangements before you commit.
No — working out what you actually want is frequently the first task, and it is a legitimate one. What helps is a starting point: a decision you keep avoiding, a situation you keep repeating, or a description of what a better year would look like even if it is vague. The scoping session exists precisely to turn that into something specific enough to work on.
Sometimes, if the focuses are genuinely different and both practitioners know it is happening. More often, sequence works better: deal with what is weighing on you, then build. If you are already seeing a therapist, tell us at the first call so the two pieces of work do not pull in opposite directions.
Something specific and usually small. A conversation you have been avoiding. An application drafted. Two weeks of honestly recorded evidence about where your time goes. A single fifteen-minute change to a morning. Commitments are agreed by you rather than issued, and if the same one is missed repeatedly, that becomes the thing we work on rather than something to feel bad about.
Yes. Coaching conversations are treated with the same confidentiality as therapeutic ones, with the same narrow legal exceptions around serious risk and safeguarding, explained in writing before you start. If your employer is paying, we agree in advance and in writing exactly what — if anything — is reported back, and it is never the content of your sessions.
More general questions — about confidentiality, records, insurance and how appointments are booked — are answered on the frequently asked questions page.
Getting started
Fifteen minutes on the phone is usually enough to work out whether life coaching is the right place to begin. There is no charge for it and nothing to sign afterwards.
Enquiries are answered within one working day. This is a planned-appointment service and not a crisis line — if you need help now, please use the urgent help page.
