By Ann Imig
What’s Life Coaching, Anyway?
Life coaching helps people get unstuck. While opening our mindset, we expand and explore our future potential. Coaching engages the client with curiosity, compassionate listening, supportive questions, and goal setting/achieving.
What’s Positive Psychology?
Positive Psychology concentrates on solutions instead of problems. Historically, psychology research and interventions focus primarily on treating “disfunction.” Positive Psychology research and interventions focus on building function. Rather than studying what isn’t working, Tal Ben-Shahar sums up Positive Psychology as “working with what works.” Positive Psychology provides an evidence-based framework and tools for increasing our own wellbeing. At its core Positive Psychology acknowledges the universality of hardship and human suffering — life’s ups and downs — and utilizes a person’s unique strengths to generate hope and optimism.
What’s Positive Psychology Coaching?
Humans are so much stronger and more resilient than we realize. Positive Psychology coaches help clients identify and connect to our strengths — how we’ve used them to successfully navigate challenges in the past, and how we can use them again to create and sustain positive change. Sonja Lyubomirsky’s happiness research demonstrates that while genetics determine 50% of our inherited “un/happiness set point,” we can impact fully 40% of our potential for happiness (life circumstances dictate the other 10%). Positive Psychology coaching provides researched and replicated action steps and tools to gain the maximum positive benefit for that 40% of our wellbeing that’s within reach.