A life coach typically focuses on helping clients achieve their goals and enhance their overall well-being, often within a framework of work-related performance and personal development. In the context of anxiety, a life coach may introduce tools to improve a client’s capacity to think, plan, lead, and manage more clearly. While the client may experience personal benefits, the conversation is often framed around enhancing effectiveness within a work role.
- Emphasis on tools: The focus is on providing clients with practical tools and techniques to manage stress and improve performance, rather than delving into the root causes of anxiety.
What is an Anxiety Coach?
An anxiety coach, while sharing some common ground with a life coach, specialises in helping individuals manage and overcome anxiety. An anxiety coach offers a solution-focused approach, drawing from neuroscience and psychology. The coach uses techniques to help clients gain control of their anxiety and achieve calmness.
- Solution-focused approach: An anxiety coach focuses on practical solutions for managing anxiety rather than exploring past issues or problems. This approach also prioritises the client’s expertise, encouraging them to take an active role in their own recovery.
- Immediate techniques: An anxiety coach provides techniques that can be used immediately to start controlling and reducing day-to-day anxiety. These techniques are often based on research and have been tested in practical situations.
How Anxiety Coaching Can Help
Anxiety coaching can help clients by providing a structured approach to understanding and managing their anxiety symptoms.
- Moving from problem-focused to solution-focused: The coach helps the client shift from focusing on what is wrong to what is right, and from what isn’t working to what is working.
- Externalising the problem: The coach helps the client to externalise their problems. So, instead of “I am anxious”, it becomes “Anxiety has been visiting me for a while”. This reframing helps the client feel less defined by their anxiety.
- Focusing on the future: The coach helps the client use the past tense when talking about problems, and the future tense when talking about what they want to be different in their lives. For example, “I will never get over this,” becomes “So until now I haven’t been able to get over what happened to me. How will my life be different when I am able to do that?”.
- Identifying exceptions: The coach encourages the client to identify exceptions to their anxiety, these being moments when they feel they have some control.
- Envisioning the future: The coach will encourage the client to imagine and describe how they would like their life to be, and to confirm that change is indeed starting to occur.
- Goal setting: The coach helps the client define their goals, similar to a taxi driver asking “Where to?” instead of “Where from?”. If the client says, “Not the airport,” the coach asks where they would like to go instead.
- Using scaling questions to gauge where the client currently feels they are in relation to handling their anxiety.
- Creating a context for change: The coach helps create a supportive environment for change, building a positive alliance with the client, acknowledging their experiences, and instilling hope and optimism.
- Emphasis on client expertise: The coach positions the client as the expert, acknowledging that they know themselves best. Questions are asked to elicit client’s expertise. For example, clients may be asked what they already know about anxiety treatments or be invited to find more information on the Internet.
Anxiety Management Coaching
An anxiety management coach often focuses on providing practical strategies and techniques that clients can use to manage anxiety in their daily lives. This type of coach helps clients to develop skills to reduce the impact of anxiety on their thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
- Techniques that may be introduced include breathing exercises, setting boundaries, or shifting focus.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) principles can be integrated, focusing on acceptance of difficult thoughts and feelings and moving towards what matters.
- Mindfulness exercises might be used to help clients observe anxious thoughts and feelings without judgement.
- Cognitive defusion, which is about changing how clients relate to their thoughts and feelings so that they can rise above them.
- Exposure, in which clients are helped to gradually face the things they are afraid of.
- Values-based action: The coach helps clients to identify what is really important to them and make choices that align with those values, which will give motivation to become more flexible.
The Difference Between an Anxiety Coach and an Anxiety Specialist
While both aim to help individuals with anxiety, their approaches and qualifications may differ.
- Anxiety Specialists: This may refer to a mental health professional such as a psychologist, psychiatrist or therapist who has specialised in the treatment of anxiety disorders. They have extensive training in the diagnosis and treatment of a wide range of mental health conditions, including anxiety disorders. Their approach may involve in-depth exploration of the origins of anxiety, using therapeutic techniques such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT).
- Therapeutic approach: They use traditional therapeutic approaches that address past issues and problems that may be linked to anxiety.
- Focus on diagnosis: Anxiety specialists may focus on diagnosing the type of anxiety.
- Medical Model: They work within a medical model and may use the term ‘patient’.
- Anxiety Coaches: This is a coach with specific training and experience in using coaching techniques to help clients manage anxiety. They may be trained in techniques from approaches such as solution focused therapy, NLP, and ACT.
- Coaching approach: They may use a non-medical model and use the term ‘client’.
- Focus on solutions: They tend to focus on solutions rather than exploring causes.
- Future focused: They will help the client to focus on the future they want, rather than analysing the past.
Techniques Used by Anxiety Coaches
Anxiety coaches use various techniques to help clients manage their anxiety. These are some common methods:
- Solution-Focused Questions: Coaches use questions that help the client identify what they want to maintain despite their anxiety, what helps them control it, and how they can comfort themselves.
- Scaling Questions: Coaches ask clients to rate their ability to handle anxiety on a scale to track progress and to encourage small steps forward.
- Externalizing the Problem: This approach helps clients separate themselves from their anxiety. The problem becomes an outside influence, not something the client is.
- Future Orientation: Coaches encourage clients to look ahead and envision the changes they want in their lives, using future tense language when talking about goals.
- Reframing: Coaches may help clients to reframe their anxiety symptoms to see them in a different light. For example, to view anxiety as a signal of their intelligence.
- Creating a ‘Calm Anchor’: Coaches help clients identify something they can focus on that brings a sense of calm, such as a word, image, or feeling.
- Mindfulness Techniques: Coaches use mindfulness to help clients stay in the present moment without being overwhelmed by thoughts and feelings. This also helps with defusion, so that they can see their thoughts as just thoughts, rather than as facts.
- Values Clarification: Coaches help clients to define their core values in life, which will help them make choices and move towards what truly matters to them.
- Behavioural Activation: Coaches encourage clients to identify behaviours they have been avoiding and to move towards them.
- Homework: Coaches may give clients tasks to complete in between sessions in order to apply the techniques they are learning to their daily lives.
- Relaxation techniques: These might include deep breathing or muscle relaxation.
The Collaborative Nature of Coaching
It’s essential to note that both life coaches and anxiety coaches work collaboratively with their clients. They both help them to define their own goals and how they will get there. Ultimately, it is the client who is in control and the coach is there to support and guide them. The coach seeks to understand the clients’ unique needs and preferences, creating an alliance that supports their journey toward positive change.