Life Coaching

If life feels unfulfilling or you’re looking for a new direction, Life Coaching can help. You may be looking for something new after a major life change or be fed up with one aspect of your life, whether it’s health, relationships, career, what to do after retirement…Life Coaching helps you to explore, discover, and prioritise your values and your personal goals.

Life Coaching from Lemons to Lemonade provides you with a range of specific evidence-based methods to enable you to live a life that's consistent with your personal values, pursue the goals that matter the most to you, and overcome the obstacles that might be holding you back.

The most effective pattern of coaching work is to have weekly sessions on the same day at the same time, so that’s our normal arrangement, though we can vary from this if it’s difficult for you.

The length of coaching depends on the nature and complexity of the issue you want to work on: it is typically around six sessions, though in some cases several more may be needed.

Life Coaching from Lemons to Lemonade is a collaborative process in which we work with you to help you change your life for the better. We don’t try and tell you what to do, our approach is about helping you to change things for yourself; you’re the expert in yourself, your values, your important goals, your strengths and weaknesses. Our expertise is in ways of helping you draw on your own values, skills, and knowledge to achieve the changes you’re looking for. Life Coaching at Lemons to Lemonade typically consists of three stages:

Exploring and identifying your goals

Modern psychological research has shown that each of us has a multitude of goals at any one time. We tend to think of “goals” as our big, long-term, abstract ideas about the kind of life we want, like to be healthy, to lose weight, to succeed in a career, or to be a good parent. It may be that you turn to life coaching for help in attaining a life goal such as these.

But we also have many short-term, immediate goals, like do the shopping, go for a job interview, meet a friend for a drink. It’s normally these short-term goals that are in our minds; we rarely have much time to think about our longer-term goals, still less our personal values, and we may not even be fully aware of what they are.

To make things even more difficult, our goals and values sometimes compete with each other: when we put our time and effort into pursuing one, others have to be put on hold. It can all become pretty complicated.

Developing a Life Strategy

A life strategy is simply a special kind of plan for living consistently with your personal values and attaining your most important goals. It takes into account that you only have limited resources (there’s only one of you, you can’t be in two places at once, there are only 24 hours in a day, you have fixed responsibilities like parenting, and you don’t have unlimited pots of money).

A good life strategy also takes into account that you’ll encounter unexpected obstacles as you try to reach you goal, and plans for how you’ll deal with them. At Lemons to Lemonade we’ve adapted methods for formulating strategies used by successful organisations, so that they apply equally well to individuals.

Implementing your Life Strategy

Once you have a life strategy that you’re happy with, we support you in putting it into practice. This usually involves you in changing behaviours – for instance dropping things that you’re used to doing but don’t really help you move towards your life goals, and starting to do things that fit better with your life strategy.

Stephen is a nationally-recognised expert in changing people’s behaviours: he was asked to contribute both a seminar and oral evidence to the House of Lords Science and Technology Committee’s inquiry into Behaviour Change.

At this stage in coaching you’ll be coached in a range of evidence-based practices that have been proven to help people pursue goals effectively. Our Stage 3 process will help you to choose the practices you’d prefer to try out, support you as you start to use them, and then enable you to check-in periodically to discuss ways to deal with any obstacles or issues that may have come up, review your progress, and notice and celebrate your successes to date.