Unlocking Personal Growth: How Life Coaching Can Transform Your Journey | Taiwanica Podcast

Ever wondered how life coaching can revolutionize your journey towards achieving your dreams? Join us as we uncover the profound benefits of life coaching with our passionate hosts, Eric and Anita. We'll share how life coaching uniquely differs from therapy and psychiatry, emphasizing a personalized approach to guide you toward success. Through a relatable example of starting a bakery, we reveal the critical role a life coach plays in fostering the right internal mindset crucial for achieving your goals.

Our discussion doesn't stop there. We clarify the distinct roles of life coaching compared to therapy, counseling, and psychiatric therapy, highlighting its focus on continuous self-improvement and goal clarity. Discover why life coaching is rapidly gaining traction globally, particularly in Taiwan, and how it can support your growth in various fields, from spiritual to relationship help. Finally, we provide resources for those interested in finding a life coach, inviting you to connect with us through our website or Instagram at Taiwanica Podcast. Don't forget to share your feedback on Spotify, Facebook, or Apple Podcast to help us refine our content and continue delivering valuable insights.

Chapters

• 0:00 Understanding Life Coaching and Its Benefits
• 12:59 Understanding Life Coaching vs Counseling
• 20:56 Finding Life Coaches in Asia

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This is episode 81, talking about life coaching. What is it and how can it be a part of your life? What's going on? Everybody? It is Eric here, one of the hosts of Taiwanica Podcast, coming back to you once again to introduce one of my favorite subjects and actually one of my professions. One of my favorite subjects and actually one of my professions and just so excited to be back here after a little break from Taiwanica podcast For all of you who follow us on a regular basis. Thank you so much for your patience and, for those who are new, welcome.

Speaker 1: 0:39

Today I am going to be introducing something that some of you may already know, that I'm a part of, and some of you might not even know what it is. That's life coaching. Why are we talking about this today? Well, one of the things that Taiwanica podcast is all about is spreading awareness, and the things that we want to share with you today are all related to the things that we're passionate about today, are all related to the things that we're passionate about, and so life coaching is something that both Anita and I like to do, and we're actually just about to start doing it as a part of our professional career. That's right, anita and I are life coaches, so if you are interested in learning more about that, tune into today's episode, because we're going to deep dive into what exactly is life coaching now? So, to start off with life coaching, it's a new trendy phrase that a lot of people are starting to hear more and more, especially in Taiwan. Starting to hear more and more, especially in Taiwan. It's actually been something that has been around for quite a while in the United States and other western countries, but in recent years it's starting to become more of a globalized profession, and so when we think about life coaching, we're trying to focus on a couple of factors, and one of the big things that a lot of people talk about with life coaching is it's very similar to some other professions. Those are therapists, psychologists and even psychiatric help psychiatrists, psychiatric help psychiatrists. So we want to get clear about what is the difference between life coaching and these medical professions I guess we can call them and also, what exactly does life coaching do that sticks out from those? Okay, so that's one big thing I want to talk about today, and another big thing about life coaching is how can you start to have a life coach in your life and why is it significant for you to have one? Okay, so we're actually going to start with that specific point of what is life coaching and how is it important to you? Okay, so here we go.

Speaker 1: 3:10

What is life coaching? Life coaching is a person who has a little bit more experience in something that you are trying to achieve and you want to ask them questions, inquire them about what is it that they have done to achieve their level of success or their level of understanding in a specific subject that you are struggling in currently. Now, this is very similar to asking for advice from, say, a professor or a mentor or even someone in your family, but there's a big difference here with life coaching. Now, with other people, you might ask them this question and they would give you their point of view and you say, oh, okay, so I can see from their example, and now I'm going to just copy that example in my own life and hopefully it will have some result from that. So, in this perspective, we're looking from an outward point of view. We're looking at someone else explaining their situation and you're trying to do the same thing they did and hoping for the same results. Okay, this is great, don't get me wrong. Learning from advice is a wonderful way to improve yourself, but the one thing that life coaching does differently here is you learn from an example and then the life coach's goal is to try to make it so that it fits into your life, rather than you just hearing it from an outward point of view. So let's get really clear about this through an example Okay.

Speaker 1: 5:10

So let's say, for example, you're trying to start your own business Okay. And let's say you want to start a bakery Okay. When you're starting a bakery, there's a few things that are involved. You have to know where you're going to have the bakery. You want to know how big your bakery is going to be. Are you going to do it just by yourself and have it just be a one person store, or are you going to have employees? Are you going to have two or three people working for you? And then there's the whole point of you know where your ingredients are going to come from. Are you going to import ingredients from foreign countries or are you going to get them from local areas?

Speaker 1: 5:55

There are all these factors that are involved and you have a choice of either understanding this information from an outward point of view by going and asking other people and let's say those people are other bakers who have their own bakeries and you ask them their perspective of how did they go about doing it, and so asking for this advice really helps you understand from an outward point of view. How did they achieve their success. They will tell you oh well, I want to have a three-person bakery. So that person the owner and two employees want to work with local farmers. So they work with all the local farmers there and they get all of their ingredients on their own. So maybe they don't use a delivery service. They go out every day and pick the things up on their own. So you have this very clear image of what they do, but you don't know what's going on inside of their mind about how are they achieving these things. You can see from an outward point of view what they are doing, but you're not seeing on the inside who they are being.

Speaker 1: 7:11

And this is the big thing that Life Coach is trying to help you understand is who do you want to be in order to do the things that you want to do? And then, when you know what you want to do, then it's very easy to have the things that you want to do, and then, when you know what you want to do, then it's very easy to have the things that you want Be do have. That's the life coach's perspective. So, instead of looking at it the other way around with advice, which advice is looking at wow, I can see what you have, you have a very nice bakery and I can see what you do and you do these actions. You shop locally, you buy your ingredients on your own, you have two employees, you have your own store, but the big question is still remaining who is that person being Right? We don't know right, we don't know. So what? When you're doing is trying to understand who can I be in this situation in order to do the things correctly and have the things I want? Okay, so a life coach will help you do that. So, if you're looking at trying to be a different person, for example, let's go to a different situation, like in a. Let's go to a different situation, like in a relationship. This is a very easy one to understand.

Speaker 1: 8:30

Sometimes, when you're in a loving relationship, your partner is asking you to be different. Maybe that's because in your relationship you have a lot of fights. Maybe you have a spouse, a wife or a husband who you get into a lot of fights over small things like maybe some dirty dishes are not getting washed on a regular basis. Okay so, maybe every day after you eat dinner you are a little tired, so you decide to leave your dishes in the sink and your wife or husband, boyfriend, girlfriend are looking at that and they get mad. They're saying, oh, there it is again. Eric is leaving his dishes in the sink. Oh man, all right, eric, here we go and we're going to have this fight over the same old thing that we fight about every day Clean your dishes, be clean, cleaner, be more responsible with your dishes. I don't want to do your dishes for you, eric, so be responsible, like me.

Speaker 1: 9:39

Notice here that we're focusing on not the actual action a lot. We're not looking at the dishes very much. We're actually just looking at the personality, the characteristic of being cleaner, being responsible, right. So when we understand that what our partners are really asking us is not about the actual dishes, it's more about who we are, what we're being, then we can easily make adjustments by looking at how we act. Okay so, maybe in certain situations I am being responsible, maybe I'm a very responsible driver, or I'm very responsible at my job, or I am very clean in my own bedroom Maybe I make my bed every day. But in some parts of our life where we have a relationship, some things can easily be forgotten or we just have a different habit with these people. And that can happen because of how we were being, who we were with other people in our life in the past Maybe with our parents or with our brothers and sisters or our close friends, something like that and these can stick with us as we get older.

Speaker 1: 11:04

So a life coach's goal here is to help you recognize in that specific moment here is to help you recognize in that specific moment oh, in this aspect of my life I'm causing a problem because I'm not being the person who I truly want to be. So if we can make a change in this scenario, then it's very easy for us to adjust according to, or hopefully with the connection with the other person's desire, and that's if you know we really want to do that. It has to be something that we are willing to change. If it's something you're not willing to change, then compromise, of course, is the other answer here. But life coach's goal is for you to understand it all starts with being someone who you desire to be, and then, after that, all the doing and the having will come with it. Come with it.

Speaker 1: 12:08

So it's a very backwards point of view that life we see in daily life shows us. A lot of times we want to have things that we see, like I see a really nice bag, maybe a new purse from a very luxurious brand, or I see a really beautiful car outside that I would call my dream car. Or I drive by a house that I see every day, that I would say, oh, wouldn't it be nice to have that house? And we always see these outward perspectives and think, maybe it's impossible for me to have that. And that's connected to limiting beliefs, and we'll talk about that more in a later episode.

Speaker 1: 12:59

But today, life coaches are simply here to help you understand that this is all capable of being yours. You can have anything you want, but realize that the person you are being right now doesn't necessarily match the person you need to be to have the things that you desire. Some things about who you're being right now is keeping you from having those things, and so that's why people keep talking about personal development, self-growth, these kind of words, Because if you work on yourself and you do personal development, then you're growing Outside of the self you are being now and into the person that you wish to be to do those things and have those things. So these slight adjustments over time, when you have someone who's already achieved them and you know that person doesn't have to be a superhero, they can be just somebody who has experienced a few more things than you have and are humble enough to tell you okay, I did this and I was being this way. Are you willing to be this way? Are you willing to be this way? And if you have the willingness to change like that, then you might see similar results. So life coaching is all about that.

Speaker 1: 14:32

Now, what I want to do is clarify what is the difference between life coaching and the other aspects that we see in life, like therapy, counseling, psychiatric therapy and these types of emotional help, therapeutic help, or some people call it mental well-being. Okay, a lot of these are very similar to life coaching, but with the other options that we just talked about therapy, counseling and these kind their goal is slightly different. Their goal here is to help you solve a problem that is within your mind or your emotional behavior Okay, within your mind or your emotional behavior, okay, life coaching can help with this, but the goal is not to solve the problem, that one problem that you have. Right, this is something that you are possessing, like it's a trophy on your wall, or the car that you have outside, outside, or you know something like this.

Speaker 1: 15:43

A lot of people look at their mental and emotional problems like this. It's like, oh, I have a disease or I have a mental problem, right, it's something that they hold, but they don't identify with it. They don't say I am this thing, I am this problem. If they do talk like that, that's simply because they are a little confused about what it is to be and to have. If you say I am sick or I am mad, well then I should be able to open a dictionary and when I look up the word mad, I should see your face there next to the definition of mad, because if you are mad, then you should be next to the definition, what it describes. And of course you are not. You are not mad, but sometimes you have mad feelings, right? Sometimes you have angry feelings, but you are not necessarily the word mad, right? So that's just an example.

Speaker 1: 16:50

Therapy is about understanding stuff like that, and psychiatric therapy talks about more serious stuff like that, like depression or adhd or schizophrenia, you know, very serious mental or disorders and these kind of things have a very serious situation. And that's the type of stuff that psychiatric doctors come in. They come and help people with medicine, with that. Life coaches don't do those sort of things because they are not related in this way. And then, when it comes to counseling, counseling and life coaching are, you can say, can be very similar, but the big difference is is that counseling is analyzing a problem and looking at it from all the different angles that you have about that problem, and its goal is for you to hopefully, crossing fingers, have a self-realization that this problem is a problem that you created. That's really what counseling is all about. And if you realize that you just created this own problem in your mind, then hopefully you will feel relieved that it no longer is a big issue because it's all in your head. It's not actually happening in reality. Okay, life coaching can help you with this too, but, like I said, it's not the goal of life coaching.

Speaker 1: 18:27

Life coaching is to help you have many realizations of who you were and who do you want to become. In other words, accepting who you are right now and acknowledging who you want to be in the future. This is a step-by-step process that helps you get guidance and clarity about what it is in life that you really want. Getting really clear about what that is. What are the common ways to achieve that? Things like law of attraction or understanding, wants and don't wants, understanding, get the power of giving up or surrendering. All of these things are the wisdom that is provided inside of a life coaching session, and so it's more of a like what life coaching says in the name. It's kind of like an activity because you're working with a coach and this coach is pushing you forward outside to be outside of your comfort zone and achieve these greatness that you really want in your life, based on what they understand and have found effective. So that is the big difference here with therapy, counseling, psychiatric therapy and life coaching.

Speaker 1: 20:01

Now, for you to gain access to this is actually becoming much easier over time Online these days. There are life coaches everywhere. You can find them on places like fiverrcom. There's a lot of individual websites that offer them A place like Amazing Talker, where Anita and I have worked before, offer it through a course called Emotional Healing. I'm actually going to create another episode explaining what emotional healing actually means and, if you wanted to personally talk to Anita or I, we are life coaches, we are certified and we offer this as a private session on our own website, which is ericananitacom.

Speaker 1: 20:56

So these are wonderful places for you to find life coaches and, like I said, this is a profession that is growing in asia. Right now, in taiwan, I know there's more and more life coaches, and so if you are looking for somebody to help you in any kind of field that you're trying to achieve greatness in, it's becoming more accessible to you day by day. So if you're interested in doing something like that or if you want to know more information about this, definitely reach out to us on our website or on Instagram at Taiwanica Podcast, and you can definitely find out more about what exactly is available to you, and especially if you're looking for spiritual or relationship help, because those are the specialties that Anita and I have, and, like I said, you can find that on our website, ericananitacom. Okay, well, I really hope that you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, please definitely like it if you're on spotify, or give us some feedback on facebook or on apple podcast.