Research Paper: How Can Coaching Support Your Life Balance?

Research Paper Assessment
Name: Bndicte Rodier (Benny) Date: June 2012 Student ID: Email: benedicter@gmail.com
Complete your 2000 word research paper and insert it in the space below. Then email this document as an attachment to assessment@icoachacademy.com
HOW CAN COACHING SUPPORT YOUR LIFE BALANCE? By Bndicte Rodier (Benny)
I.
Table of Contents
HOW CAN COACHING SUPPORT YOUR LIFE BALANCE? ...................................................... 2 A. B. 1. 2. C. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. D. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. E. F. How can coaching support life balance? .............................................................. 3 What is life balance? ............................................................................................ 3 Life balance is complex and multiple ............................................................... 3 Life balance is dynamic .................................................................................... 4 Coaching supports self-awareness and self-discovery ......................................... 4 Knowing yourself ............................................................................................. 4 Knowing your values ........................................................................................ 5 Reframing your perspective.............................................................................. 5 Recognizing your Underlying Automatic Commitment .................................. 6 Renew yourself ................................................................................................. 7 Coaching creates life balanced solutions ............................................................. 7 Unique solution for unique people ................................................................... 7 Develop your creativity to create more balance in your life ............................ 8 Holding a safe space with positive energy ....................................................... 8 Small but effective steps ................................................................................... 8 Create your support system .............................................................................. 9 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 9 Bibliography ....................................................................................................... 10
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A.
How can coaching support life balance?
In this paper, we will discover how coaching can support life balance. First, we will clarify what we mean by life balance.
B.
What is life balance?
Quite often, we can hear people mentioning work-life as a general concept, worklife balance is a feeling of being in control of your life, being able to exercise choice, and about finding an equilibrium between your own needs and those of others, whether at work or at home. 1 In this research paper, we intentionally did not refer to work-life balance but to LIFE BALANCE because we strongly believe that life encompasses much more than just the work and personal life dichotomy. The balance is not just between your home and your work, it is much more complex. Life balance is in essence as complex as human beings are. We could define life balance as a way of being and living that do not "require either hyperactive time management or drastic career downshifting2. Life balance is also the opportunity to experience peace and tranquility while living in a hectic world.3 Therefore life balance touches the core of who we are, our life purpose and our wellbeing. 1. Life balance is complex and multiple
Life balance for a manager, an expat, a woman, a mother, a man, a grandfather, a CEO, a retiree, a single person, a father, an immigrant, a teenager and a divorcee does not mean the same.
1
2
Balance Your Life and WorkHow to Get the Best from Your Job and Still have a Life
Beyond Juggling: Rebalancing Your Busy Life by Kurt Sandholtz, Brooklyn Derr, Kathy Buckner and Dawn Carlson 3 Cora, Gabriela. ( 2010). Executivehealth.coms leading under pressure: strategies to avoid burnout, increase energy, and improve your well-being, chapter 1, overview.
It is even more complex when you include the various lives which compose a human being's life span. For example, a woman could be a divorced mother, a CEO, an aunt and a grandmother. Or a man could be a stay at home dad, an expat, an uncle, a brother, a volunteer and a son. There are so many combinations possible. All these combinations clearly show us that balancing ones life is very complex because ones life can be so varied and distinctive. 2. Life balance is dynamic
Your life balance will evolve and change as you go through life. It is not stagnating. What would be a good life balance for you: As a 30 year old, may not be working for you at 40 or 50 years old. As a young professional, may not be working so well as a new dad. As a senior executive, may not be working so well as a son taking care of elderly parents. As a young parent, may not be working so well as a parent with teenagers at home. This is why life balance is dynamic; it follows the inherent dynamism of life. Now that we have clarified what is life balance for us in this research, we will now see in which ways coaching can support life balance.
C.
Coaching supports self-awareness and self-discovery

1. Knowing yourself
As we just saw, life balance is not just about your work or just your home life, it is truly about yourself. So in order to balance your life, you need to balance yourself first. To balance yourself, you need to know yourself well. Coaching is an excellent way to support your self-reflection and self-awareness. The coaching process will support you in getting clarity on who you truly are and how you want your life to be. You will be able to see more clearly when you are in and out of balance.
You will know what being in or out of balance means for you. Coaching can also help find out when in the past you felt in or out of balance and then reflect on those moments to be even more familiar with what in and out of balance means for you in your life. This self-discovery will not only help you understand who you are, what life balance means to you but also will help you take steps to stay in-balance.
2.
Knowing your values
Life balance is deeply connected to your values. Once again, coaching will help you find your true values through self-discovery exercises. Coaching will help you in highlighting what is important for you in your life. What you value as the most important priorities for you in your life will indicate how you may want to balance your life. Life balance is about spending most of your time on your most important priorities. In his article, Robert Cummins explains that life balance can be measured by the size of the discrepancy between how we should and how we do allocate our time4. With coaching, you can find out how you want to allocate your time to reach your life balance goal. And with coaching, you can also find out your life balance discrepancy. If it is too high, coaching will help you realize what is taking up too much of your time and also will help you take steps to diminish this life balance discrepancy. Coaching will also help you make sure that the size of this discrepancy is zero or close to zero and stays that way in the long term. 3. Reframing your perspective
Through coaching you will get clarity on what YOU need to change.
Cummins, Robert ( 2009), Measuring life balance through discrepancy theories and subjective wellbeing, in Life balance : multidisciplinary theories and research, Slack Inc and AOTA Press, Thorofare, N.J. and Bethesda, MD, pp.73-93.
One important thing you will understand with coaching is that you cannot change people around you but you can change the way you see and perceive things happening around you. If you want more life balance in your life, you first need to reframe your perspective. For example, instead of putting the blame on your kids, your husband, your hectic work schedule, your difficult colleagues or customers etc, your coach will invite you to change your perspective and see your life from another angle or with special glasses. Instead of relying on others around you to support you with your life balance, you will need to start with yourself by changing what you perceive and by changing the way you react to events or people around you. You will powerfully become the leader in your life balance, you will design a strategy and a plan and commit to it. You will not rely on people around you only to help you be in-balance. You will not need to wait anymore for people around you to be ready, you just need to be ready to see your life from another perspective. You just need to be ready to take this responsibility on your own shoulders.
4.
Recognizing your Underlying Automatic Commitment
You may find yourself truly committed to being in-balance. However, for some reasons, it does not seem to work. Even though, you are more focused and you know where you want to go and what life balance is for you, it still feels like you are always out of balance. This could indicate that you will need to focus on your Underlying Automatic Commitment (UAC). Coaching can help you focus on your UACs, learning what they are and if these UACs are supporting you or not. UAC are commitments that we have with ourselves that we are not aware of and they constitute an automatic response. A UAC could be positive or negative. It is important to discover them if they are negative or if they are not allowing you to reach your goal.
Once you have recognized the UACs which do not support your growth and your goal then you can take action and change them. First, you need to be aware of them, recognize them and then you can take action. Coaching will support you in doing so.
5.
Renew yourself
It is essential to know yourself well as we just saw but another essential point is to make sure you know how to care for yourself and get out of the sacrifice syndrome. Annie Mckee, in her article5, talks about the sacrifice syndrome and how we need to learn to get out of this sacrifice cycle. Managing the "cycle of sacrifice and renewal" begins with prioritizing well-being. You can start by cultivating practices that allow you to re-engage with yourself, focus optimistically on the future and connect compassionately with other people. What Annie McKee is sharing with us here is crucial. The need to re-engage with yourself
D.
Coaching creates life balanced solutions

1. Unique solution for unique people
What makes coaching so effective is the fact that the role of a coach is not to give solutions to a client. The role of a coach is to support you in finding the best solutions by yourself for yourself. As we have discussed earlier, we clearly saw that each client is unique and lives in a unique context therefore each solution should be unique. The coaching process will respect this uniqueness in each human being. When you aim at balancing your life, you need to find your unique solutions. The fact that the solution is found by you will ensure its sustainability and its efficiency.
Balance Yourself, Not Work and Life, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-mckee/life-
balance_b_1284613.html
You will also own these solutions and these steps since it came from your own deep thinking and powerful reflection on what would work best for you.
2.
Develop your creativity to create more balance in your life
Coaching will support you in finding various solutions but more importantly it will allow you to go so deep and so wide in your thinking that it will bring some solutions you never thought of. All this is certainly due to your coachs powerful questions and deep listening which will support your deep thinking and widen your usual way of thinking. It will uncover tremendous creative resources inside of you which you never would have thought you had in yourself. You will be able to focus thoroughly on your life balance and come up with unique out of the box solutions.
3.
Holding a safe space with positive energy
One of the most important roles a coach plays is to create a positive and safe space for you. This special safe space will allow you to bloom. Thanks to this special comforting and reassuring space, you will be able to focus on the present, find new ways of thinking, of looking at a situation and of resolving problems.
4.
Small but effective steps
One of the reasons why coaching is so efficient is that it allows the client to find out what is their goal and then to plan small steps until they reach this goal. This applies perfectly for life balance. To effectively reach your life balance, you will need to plan small steps along the way and make small choices every day. It can be quite overwhelming to only see the goal in itself and not the way to reach it. Coaching will guide you through this path; will make your ultimate goal less overwhelming. You will create specific rules to make sure that every day your choices will lead you to your goal.
One of the treasures of coaching is also that what we focus on grows6. If you are determined and want to focus on getting a better life balance, you can do it and with coaching you will be able to achieve it. By focusing on specific steps, by prioritizing, your life balance goals are more reachable.
5.
Create your support system
As we just discussed, coaching is focused on you and will support you in finding your solutions. Your coach will also encourage you to adapt your way of thinking and being so that you reach your goal. You will start with yourself but you will also need the help of others around you. Your coach will help you identify people around you who can support you in the long term. This is even more important for life balance because it can be easy to move from in-balance to out of balance. Life balance is not a goal that you reach and then once you are there you stay there. In fact, it is a constant art of balancing. Therefore, in this art you will need support from other people in addition to your coach. People who will keep you accountable, people who will know what is important for you, people you can trust who will support you in staying in-balance in the long-term. Your life balance journey with your coach is just the beginning, you will create strong and solid foundations and then you will need to sustain this new life balance with those people around you. Your coachs role is to help build your own unique life balance support system.
E.
Conclusion
We discovered that life balance is not about your work and your home life only. Life balance is truly about yourself. Therefore, in order to balance your life, you need to balance yourself first and know yourself well. Coaching is a very practical means to get to know yourself better and take the time to reflect on who you are and what you want in life.
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Creating Action, ICA module IE-221-CRAC

We discovered in many varied ways how coaching can support your life balance starting from inside by knowing yourself, your values, your UACs and continuing with the outside by looking at your life 'with new eyes', by taking practical steps towards your goal of being more in balance in your life. In conclusion, we can say that by nature coaching is one of the best ways to support you in achieving life balance as it respects your uniqueness and adapts to your unique needs at a unique time.
F.
Bibliography
Black, A&C. ( 2005). Balance your life and work: how to get the best from your job and still have a life. Cora, Gabriela. ExecutiveHealth.coms Leading Under Pressure: Strategies to Avoid Burnout, Increase Energy, and Improve Your Well-Being. Career Press. 2010. Cummins, Robert. Measuring life balance through discrepancy theories and subjective well-being, in Life balance: multidisciplinary theories and research, Slack Inc and AOTA Press, Thorofare, N.J. and Bethesda, MD, pp.73-93, ( 2009). McKee, Annie (2012). Balance Yourself, Not Work and Life: Huffington Post Healthy Living. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-mckee/life-balance_b_1284613.html Sandholtz, Kurt & Derr, Brooklyn & Buckner, Kathy &Carlson, Dawn. Beyond juggling: rebalancing your busy life. ( 2002). International Coaching Academy. Creating Action: module IE-221-CRAC ( 2010).
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Research Paper Assessment

How can coaching support life balance?

What is life balance?

Coaching supports self-awareness and self-discovery

Knowing your values

Recognizing your Underlying Automatic Commitment

Coaching creates life balanced solutions

Balance Yourself, Not Work and Life, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-mckee/life-

Develop your creativity to create more balance in your life

Holding a safe space with positive energy

Small but effective steps

Create your support system

Creating Action, ICA module IE-221-CRAC

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