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Living with Vitality: What is a life coach; do I need one?

Abby Ruby
Daily Correspondent
Vail, CO Colorado
Special to the DailyAbby Ruby.
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Henry David Thoreau said: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.”

Are you living the life you’ve imagined? What would it take to walk the path of your dreams? Life coaches can help you realize your goals and actualize your ambitions. No one reaches their pinnacle alone. Professional athletes utilize the expertise of coaches. Highly successful business executives have coaches to aid in their effective and efficient day-to-day task handling. So why shouldn’t you enlist the help of a life coach? You deserve it. We all are worthy of having someone on our team helping us to objectively assess what is working and what isn’t and to come up with a plan to get us moving in the right direction.

Juxtaposed with traditional therapy, which often helps individuals look into their past to create a better present, life coaching looks into the future and helps clients develop a plan to reach their goals. Specifically, life coaching, or integrative counseling, offers clients an opportunity to take a closer look at their goals, whether physical, mental, emotional, professional or financial. With the help of an objective and highly educated professional, clients learn how to evaluate the ways in which each goal can work more synergistically through the implementation of goal setting, organized scheduling, monitoring and measuring progress, support and accountability. Too often we compartmentalize our lives and isolate segments of ourselves, and in so doing, we are unable to reach our ultimate goals in fitness, life and beyond. For example, working to reach financial success may mean looking deeply at emotional and physical health, while working toward a weight-loss goal may mean taking a close look at effective coping skills. Integrative counseling takes a comprehensive approach to help clients map out the most effective ways to accomplish their ambitions in a holistic way.



Life coaches help clients clarify their goals and identify barriers – oftentimes past issues and negative beliefs – that keep them from achieving these goals. A life coach also can guide clients, helping them evaluate life plans and monitor behavioral and thought patterns that support and/or detract from stated goals. Together, the life coach and the client develop a strategic plan – a road map – that integrates fitness, nutrition, healthy coping skills and intermediate goals to assure a positive outcome.

Working toward actualizing your potential necessitates a closer examination of the body/mind/spirit as a whole being. Holding mind/body/spirit at the forefront of everything enacts the most rapid and sustainable change a person can make in life. Integrative counseling provides clients with a road map to identify their goals in many facets of their lives. The process works toward actualizing those goals as an integrative whole.

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Abby Ruby, Ph.D., is a senior coach for Carmichael Training Systems, a USA Triathlon Level II coach, a NATA-BOC certified athletic trainer, a CISSN sport nutritionist, a RYT certified yoga instructor and an author (“In Sickness and In Health: Exercise Addiction in Endurance Athletes”). Ruby offers group and one-on-one coaching options, including nutrition counseling, optimal performance strategy, life coaching and sports psychology. Call 970-476-7721.


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