How do you know if you need a love life coach?
Read these telltale signs…
Throughout our lives we are coached by experts. As children many of us will have joined a club to be coached to play football, dance or sing. Perhaps we had extra coaching for things we found difficult like extra Maths or English tuition, to ensure we met the grade. In work and business people seek out advisors and mentors, while sports people at the top of their game look to coaches to help them develop further and reach peak performance. Yet when it comes to our love life and important relationships, we generally seem to leave our success or failure, pleasure or pain, to chance. Few of us ever think to seek out support except perhaps the odd bit of advice from parents and friends. Yet they can only ever speak from their personal perspective and are definitely not experts in this field!
“As a relationship therapist and love life coach, people often ask me, how can love life coaching help me?” says Helen Rice Founder of BeLoveCurious.com. “Deciding to ask for help with your relationship is a very personal decision and there are many reasons why clients seek us out. Here’s our Top 10 Telltale Signs that reveal you‘re in need of some help to find your dating-to-relationship mojo and some clues as to how we might work with you to get the love life results you want.”
1.You find a reason not to date any and every one
Do you have a check list of all the things you don’t want in a partner? You know the things we’re talking about – they have to be a certain height, they must have dark hair not blonde, only a lawyer or a banker will do etc. While a dating coach does advocate you being clear on what you are looking for in a partner, they will make you think carefully about how you could be limiting your options.
2.You have started to believe that you are destined to be single and are better off that way
Do you constantly tell people that you are better off single and never wanted to have a relationship anyway? Do you really believe this or is it easier to keep telling yourself and everyone else that? A relationship coach can help you challenge your fixed ways of thinking about yourself and other people and help you explore and understand what’s really getting in the way of achieving your love, sex, dating and relationship goals.
3. You feel like you always attract Mr/Miss Wrong
Feel like you only ever attract the bad ones? Do you always follow a similar dating pattern? A dating coach can help you identify these patterns and help you to break them. They may also reflect on your first loves, as it is often these early relationships that set the foundations for later love or lack of it.
4. You can’t get past the first date and don’t know why?
Why is it that your friends seem to find it so easy and yet you can’t get past the first date. Chatting through your hopes and fears, and perhaps even play acting a first date scenario – perhaps with a glass of wine in hand can give you some perspective on what you’re doing and why it might not be helping you to that so desired second date.
5. You think about your ex all of the time and can’t seem to move on
Do you compare every new date to your ex? Does everything you do or say remind you of them; songs on the radio, your favourite box set? A love life coach will help you to talk about special people and events in your past to reveal what you are doing now to protect your heart and keep others at a distance.
6. You really want to find the ONE but seem to scare off potential candidates
You know you want a relationship and are desperate to find love, but your actions are currently having a different reaction. Sometimes you need to take an alternative approach and do things differently to the way you are doing them now; often it helps to just stop. A dating coach can help you create goals and then make a plan for success – working with you to overcome the barriers and resistance you might feel when taking on new personal challenges.
7. You feel that you don’t really deserve a happy relationship
You don’t really like yourself that much, so why should anyone else? Does this sound familiar – do you think you’re not attractive enough, or clever or outgoing enough to find a fulfilling relationship? Think again, most of us entertain more negative than positive thoughts about ourselves. A relationship coach will look to find out what is at the source of these negative thoughts and help you to see them as the self-limiting untruths that they are.
8. You’ve lost your confidence?
What’s caused you to lose your confidence? Can you pin-point the moment when your confidence vanished or has a bad date left you feeling flat and uninspired? Working with a coach to get to the bottom of such experiences and what you’ve made it mean about you, is key to ditching the unhelpful opinions you hold about yourself that are stopping you from having the relationship you really want.
9. You believe that men/women you date are only interested in you for sex, nothing more
It is possible to have sex without intimacy and yet sex and intimacy are so completely intertwined when we are interested in creating a successful, loving relationship. A dating coach can help you to explore your attitudes, values, beliefs and practices around both sex and intimacy and work with you to ensure you are fulfilled in your relationships.
10. Your relationship rules are set in stone
Are you someone that has very particular relationship rules and won’t budge when it comes to carrying them out? For example, your date should always call first, text messages should be replied to instantly or within a set number of hours, no sex until the third date? Sometimes having such high expectations of how your date should behave (when often they have no idea of these rules) can only lead to disappointment and upset. Connecting with a relationship coach will allow you to explore the origin of these relationship rules and discover strategies for adapting them so that they don’t compromise your future happiness.
Helen continues: ‘Relationship coaching can be of benefit to everyone, whether you are already in a relationship or single. We believe that everyone can have the relationship of their dreams. All it takes is a willingness to be:
* Curious about why your love-life isn’t working out the way you’d like it to
* Interested in discovering new things about yourself
* Doing some things differently, even when it might feel a bit awkward
* Persistent!
Helen concludes: “Engaging with a relationship coach in a relaxed, ongoing and totally confidential conversation will help you to explore what’s getting in the way of achieving your love-life or relationship goals. Just by getting really interested in the whys and wherefores of your current love-story we know you’ll start to see new things about yourself and your approach to life, love, sex, dating and relationships. These insights will allow you to better understand what and how you can do things differently to move closer to having the kind of relationship you really want.”
