Coaching as a Stress Reducer
Coaching can be a powerful tool for stress reduction by helping individuals manage demands, build resources, and change their perspectives. Here’s how, drawing from the sources and our conversation history:
- Building Resources: Coaching helps individuals invest more in resources to manage their demands. By identifying personal strengths and competencies, clients discover how they manage to cope even in difficult circumstances.
- Values Clarification: Mindfulness within coaching can help individuals identify, prioritise and find the energy and courage to pursue their values, and this can reduce stress. Coaching can focus on values and actions that address stress, which will result in a better well-being and potentially counteract negative stress.
- Promoting Self-Regulation: Coaching equips people with self-regulation and relaxation techniques which are a natural way to control the energy of stress. These tools can help manage the nervous system’s over reactivity, restoring balance after the fight-or-flight response.
- Encouraging Proactive Planning: Coaching promotes anticipating stressful activities and planning for them. This involves effective time management, building in ‘quiet’ time to evaluate the present and consider the future.
- Action-Oriented Approach: Coaching guides people to take action to minimise stress. This can involve problem-solving techniques to identify stressors, their causes, choices, priorities, and decisions.
- Reframing Perspectives: Coaching helps people reframe situations as challenges rather than threats, leading to excitement instead of anxiety. It can help individuals change their mindset, enhance their healing ability, and improve relationships.
- Cultivating Positive Emotions: Solution-focused coaching increases positive affect and one’s understanding of the nature of the problem, which reduces negative affect and increases self-efficacy.
- Managing Expectations: Coaching involves managing expectations by being aware of them and choosing new ones, helping individuals stay cool under pressure.
- Facilitating Insight: Coaches can facilitate insight by asking questions that encourage global and wide thinking, reducing anxiety and increasing positive emotions.
- Promoting Choice: Coaching reminds individuals of the choices they have in a situation, reducing the threats from both autonomy and uncertainty. Even small perceptions of choice can impact limbic system arousal.
- Building Resilience: Coaching focuses on building resilience and positivity, increasing access to positive emotions.
- Setting Boundaries: Coaching can also help individuals set healthy and safe boundaries to reduce stress.
- Addressing Burnout: Coaching can address burnout by encouraging self-care and helping individuals create space between their home life and other responsibilities.
In summary, coaching reduces stress by building resources, clarifying values, promoting self-regulation, encouraging proactive planning, reframing perspectives, cultivating positive emotions, managing expectations, facilitating insight, promoting choice, building resilience, setting boundaries and addressing burnout.
Tags: stress reduction, coaching, resilience, coping mechanisms, stress management, solution-focused, positive psychology, well-being