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Life Coaching
Goose Creek Coaching is the premier Northern Virginia life coaching practice. The practice focuses on comprehensive care for its clients, with coaches providing support from action-oriented, goal-directed and results-oriented planning and support. Goose Creek's coaches focus on execution and follow through in our work with clients.
Life Coaching has been shown to benefit those who need to set goals and chart their features with active work that goes beyond theraputic interventions. Coaching has been shown to work with those with and without mental disorders. Coaching has also been shown to benefit those with career, motivation and other similar problems that clients want to address.
Our coaches are certified in coaching or trained mental health professionals.
Please contact us for more information.
Why Choose Life Coaching?
 Life coaching is a form of action-oriented, forwarded-focused help for individuals attempting to achieve their goals and trying to better manage their lives. Life coaching is not an alternative to psychotherapy or psychiatric services, but it compliments them by providing day-to-day support and coordination among clients and caregivers, rapid follow up and adjustments, regular feedback and a focus on practical coping skills. Life coaches seek to help clients develop their goals and provide practical advice, support and follow-up.
Life coaching focuses on triggers, coping skills, motivation, career and personal development and other elements of life to provide the most holistic and practical help to clients. In working with people to improve the quality of their lives, psychology has traditionally focused on alleviating dysfunctional and treating psychopathology in clinical or counseling populations. Life coaching seeks to enhance quality of life, whether that means improving coping skills, such as time management or prioritizing or managing triggers to anxiety, and adds flexible goal-setting, support and follow up to the mix. Life coaching can be beneficial to anyone, regardless of their mental health situation, while those with mental illnesses can also from life coaching as an adjunctive support to psychotherapy and medication management.
A 2008 article in Counseling Today described counseling and life coaching as "stepsiblings" in the sense that they are "helping endeavors" but that they differed in the area of training, credentialing, certification, licensure, professional orientation, techniques, core issues of focus, the client relationship and other areas. Here are some common differences between professional counseling and life coaching, as described by Richard D. Johnson, PhD.: Professional counseling tends to focus on the past, while life coaching tends to focus on the present; professional counseling focuses on developmental issues while life coaches focus on tangible goals and objectives; professional counseling focuses on the importance of emotions where life coaching focuses on practical and common sense; professional counseling focuses on understanding and insight where life coaching focuses on motivation and solutions and professional counseling tends to focus on internal matters where has life coaching focuses on external functioning. In addition, because of the breadth of their training, professional therapists are able more able move from one foci to another with their clients, while life coaches tend to focus on the specific presenting problems.
Is Life Coaching Evidence-Based?
 Life coaching has emerged from several other fields that focus on the development of people, including counseling, psychotherapy, management consulting and others. Life coaching is most focused on learning and change. Behaviorism, learning theories, behavioral modeling, skills-based education, behavioral anchoring, stress management, personal development and a variety of other techniques used in life coaching have been empirically researched and supported as appropriate and effective interventions.
The strongest supporting evidence for the efficacy of life coaching has emerged in the area of helping those with problems related to executive functioning, including individuals with AD/HD, Aspergers Syndrome and other pervasive developmental disorders. The anecdotal evidence -- based on reports from individual cases -- was first addressed in the area of AD/HD in the 1994 book, Driven to Distraction, by Edward M. Hallowell, M.D. and John J. Ratey, M.D. The authors wrote about how coaching helped their clients maintain focus to achieve identified goals, translate abstract goals into concrete actions and to build motivation and learn to use rewards effectively. Through regular interactions, coaches learn how problems play out in the daily lives of their clients and then provide encouragement, recommendations, feedback and practical techniques to address specific challenges. They also may offer reminders, raise questions and suggest practical techniques and coping skills.
Groundbreaking research supporting these conclusions has been reported in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, including this paper, published in the journal Social Behavior and Personality, by the University of Sydney psychologist, Anthony M. Grant, PhD., who concluded that "the study provided empirical evidence that a life coaching program can facilitate goal attainment, improve mental health and enhance quality of life" and that "participants' reported levels of depression, anxiety and stress were significantly reduced, with most reporting a significantly enhanced quality of life." Dr. Grant noted that "it is clear that the general public has a thirst for techniques and processes that enhance life experience and facilitates personal development" that solutions-focused life coaching "recognize the quadratic reciprocity between the four domains of human experience: behavior, thoughts, feelings and environment."
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For more information on other forms of coaching, you can visit the following pages or contact us:
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