What is Positive Psychology Coaching?

I want to answer the most commonly asked question I get:

What does a (positive) psychology coach do?!

When it comes to coaching, most people look for a ‘business coach’ for business related things and maybe a ‘mindset coach’ or ‘life coach’ for mindset and life related things. I think sometimes people dismiss the kind of coaching I offer because they think “well, that’s not what I need, I don’t need positive psychology!”

The thing is though, psychology is what underlies everything you do.

Struggling to make a business decision? Psychology. 🧠

Keep getting in your own way? Psychology. 🧠

Struggling to feel you can be yourself? Psychology. 🧠

Needing to hire a team? Psychology. 🧠

Psychology is your brain and behaviour so you quite literally can’t do anything in business and life without it and so when I talk about coaching psychology or psychology coaching, I’m referring to ‘normal’ coaching but from a psychology angle.

Practically, this means that if you are struggling to make a business decision I won’t just tell you want to do (like a mentor/strategist might) or tell you what makes strategic or scaleable sense (like a business coach might) and instead we will dive into why you’re struggling to make the decision in the first place.

Is it because you’re unclear on the purpose of your business? Is it because you are a people pleaser trying to make others happy? Is it because you have other people relying on you to make ‘sensible’ decisions? 

While it might be desirable to get a quick fix or for someone to just tell you what to do in hard moments, it doesn’t actually solve the underlying problem and acts as a plaster over the top as opposed to a solution.

Typically that means the same issue will keep coming back.

Maybe you’ve been in a situation like this where it feels like you keep having to relearn the lesson or you end up in the same situations repeatedly. It’s because surface level solutions won’t give you longer term results.

So when I coach with a psychology angle, what I’m saying is that I will coach you but I also have vast experience and the qualifications to understand what’s going on in your brain and how that might be linking in with your current behaviour/experience. I can help you better understand yourself by sharing psychological theory and research (if that’s something you’re into, but equally if not that’s fine too!) I can use research backed methods to help you do things like increase your confidence or find more purpose in your work that have been tested and proven to work. I can also do deeper mindset work than a lot of coaches that don’t have the training in psychology.

What about the ‘positive psychology’ bit? Well positive psychology is an area of psychology that comes at things from the angle of how can we make our lives better as opposed to how can we remove suffering. It often looks at how we can be proactive to do things that will prevent us from feeling bad longer term as opposed to waiting until we already feel bad and then reacting to it with solutions.

This is the angle I like to come at my coaching from.

It’s not about “omg you hate your life so we need to fix that”, it’s more about “ok how could we make your life even more enjoyable and fulfilling than it already is?”