I have heard about Life Coaching.  Well, I have a few minutes. What is it?

Life Coaching is a forward-thinking, compassionate, collaborative, interactive, caring, objective, and professional partnership based upon equality between you and me that helps you achieve your personal, family, relationship, career, transitional, spiritual, business goals and more. Together, we acknowledge and accept you for whom and what you are now. We then prepare a list of your current and future goals and objectives.

You prioritize them and collectively we design the steps necessary to achieve what you want. This becomes your action plan. The remainder of our coaching includes monitoring, revising, completing your action plan and then celebrating your success.

I want a Life  Coach with lots of coaching knowledge and skills. How long ago did you discover Life Coaching?

Dr. Dick Borough, a practitioner in Palo Alto, California, used the term, Life Coach to describe his leadership development activities in 1985. In 1979, I created several school-based Prevention Teams that included students, teachers, counselors, clergy, administrators, and parents.  The foundation and concepts that I developed for the Prevention Teams are considered Life Coaching by today’s professional standards.

In 1983, I founded and directed the Phoenix, Arizona-based Southwest Institute where I trained fifty instructors to teach what we know today internationally as Life and Business Coaching to the public, many businesses, governments, and corporations. Today, they would be considered Life Coaches and Business Coaches. The training concepts and principles that I developed for Southwest Institute were more extensive than the certification training provided by current Life Coaching schools.

There seems like hundreds of Life Coaching websites. Why are there so many?

My college Sociology professor taught the value of having a genuine sense of belonging. He believed that without this sense of belonging, we could experience anomie. This is a feeling of disorientation and alienation. We want to become natural and authentic now.  For you to create a healthy lifestyle and a sense of belonging, it helps to establish a partnership with a compassionate, intuitive, innovative, inspiring, challenging and strong motivator who serves as your Life Coach.

Exponentially, people are discovering that Life Coaching is especially effective and that measurable results can begin almost immediately in some significant areas. Coaching with a professional expert is more socially acceptable than working with a counselor. This is particularly true with men who want effective and reasonably quick ways to achieve personal and business fulfillment without having to delve into their childhood.

Currently, who hires you as a Life Coach?

Well, you do if you:

• Currently are in a personal, professional, spiritual or career transition.
• Feel highly motivated to change your life.
• Choose to invest in your own future.
• Want an intelligent, compassionate, motivating, and powerful partnership assisting you with changes through the structure, direction, feedback, support, and clarity.
• Value a trusted nonjudgmental confidant.
• Need a sense of urgency to move you to the next levels of your life.
• Desire a professional who is even more committed to your dreams than you are now.
• Expect a coach who has excellent intuition, superb communication skills, non-attachment, and 46+ years’ experience, a wonderful sense of humor, unconditional compassion, and strength to tell you the truth with facts to back it up.

When I hire you as my Life Coach. What are YOUR responsibilities?

• Provide you with fresh and unique perspectives to your daily life.
• Answer every question with curiosity, integrity, and honesty.
• Brainstorm, recommend, suggest, and enlighten.
• Highly motivate you.
• Evoke your excellence.
• Help you identify, clarify, and honor your beliefs, values, and principles.
• Accelerate your progress.
• Support you in finding your courage.
• Help you to set goals, and implement them.
• Establish appropriate accountability measures for your coaching tasks between sessions.
• Acknowledge that you are capable of making wise decisions with guidance.
• Assist you to clarify your own unique gifts, and decide how you want to share them.
• Direct you to focus on the future rather than your past.
• Ask insightful questions.
• Transform your dreams into practical actions.

What will you NOT do for me with our Life Coaching?

1. Counsel you in any way.
2. I am not your therapist.
3. Do for you what you can do for yourself.
4. Give you medical, financial, or legal advice.
5. Tell you what you want to hear when it is not the truth.
6. Continue to coach you if it is no longer effective or we have already accomplished your goals.

I am a creative individualist. I want more time to perform my art and less effort on obstacles. Do you coach creative performers?

Yes. as a writer, artist, and photographer I coach:

•      musicians
•      writers
•      poets
•      artists
•      photographers
•      singers
•      actors
•      comedians
•      and more

What other types of Life Coaching do you offer?

I offer Life Coaching including the following:

1. Entrepreneur
2. Corporate
3. Writing
4. Retirement
5. Veteran
6. Executive
7. Career
8. Transition
9. Business
10. Relationship
11. Marriage
12. Life Coaching mentoring for other coaches

How is Life Coaching successful?

Life Coaching is effective by the process of assimilating, synthesizing, strategizing, integrating, analyzing, formulating, and implementing everything that we discuss together so that you can do more than if you were on your own. The success of Life Coaching includes these and many more diverse approaches.

How many people have been in your life that really cared about you and listened better than most of the people you have known, suspended judgments about you and your behavior, and asked insightful and thoughtful questions rather than giving advice?  Who is providing this for you now? Your success begins when you hire a Life Coach who does this naturally.

I understand the basic concepts of Life Coaching. How do I know that YOU are the best professional Life Coach for me?

You can request a free 30-minute telephone complimentary session with me by clicking on my Contact Stephen tab to experience my coaching style and how we connect. You’ll have a good idea of our compatibility and my capacity to meet your needs when you:

• Experience my compassion, intelligence, sense of humor, trust, intuition, respect, and honor for you and our coaching partnership.
• Learn significant things about yourself in our first coaching session that you did not know.
• Know that I believe in your capacity to make the necessary changes that bring you to the life you desire and deserve.
• Hear my thoughtful, unusual, and stimulating questions that support and challenge you to empower yourself.
• Embrace our Life Coaching relationship through unconditional compassion, vulnerability, patience, non-self-importance, curiosity, presence, nonjudgmental, and accountability.
• Our personal or business coaching partnership creates new ways for you to honor your authenticity.

How does Embracing the Muse Life Coaching work?

I believe that you have all of the answers that you need to live a natural, compassionate, passionate, and meaningful life. You simply need to learn how to ask the most effective questions to access your unique answers. We accomplish this in our life coaching self- discovery process. We create a process that works best for where you are and we review it constantly. Sometimes I provide many diverse worksheets that help you create valuable information for your growth. I revise these worksheets frequently and design them with my current clients in mind.  I guarantee that everything we share in your Life Coaching session will remain completely confidential.

I understand that you developed the Seven Elements Of Essence

I completed my development of the Seven Elements of Essence after my first visit to the Vietnam Wall Memorial in 1989. I continue to apply these concepts in my coaching. Below is a brief description.

1. Unconditional Compassion provides insight into others and yourself without a preconceived belief system.
2. Nonjudgment offers you the opportunity to experience moments in your life without attachments.
3. Nonself-importance gives you meaning and purpose for simply being, rather than doing.
4. Vulnerability creates bridges rather than castles with drawbridges and moats.
5. Patience promotes space and time to reflect.
6. Presence allows you the means to use your intellect and intuition.
7. Curiosity brings you the objective perspective balanced with a creative imagination to resolve issues.

Our First Life Coaching Session Together

I initially ask you:

• Who is the authentic and natural you?
• What is the essence of you?
• What are your paths and life purpose?
• Do you now have the courage to change?
• How can we best support your core values and beliefs through our professional services?
• What are your most effective learning styles?
• What areas of insights and perspective have you never experienced?
• What process for your accelerated growth is the wisest?
• How can we contribute to your life so that you are better than when we first connected?
•  How will you handle achieving your success?
• What are your most effective mewthods of sabotage?

Then I do everything that I can to help you establish effective specific goals and objectives and show you how to accomplish these both during and after our professional partnership.

I have observed a variety of lifelong patterns that prevent people from reaching their goals. Subsequently, I have shown my clients how to embrace these patterns and effectively reach their personal, professional, and spiritual goals.

What are the differences between Life Coaching and psychological therapy?

Life Coaching is not therapy.  It is not designed to be therapy. It is not a substitute for therapy. The basic goal of therapy is to bring an individual with a dysfunctional life to a state of function. Therapy is about treating the person, while life coaching guides and supports. There are many other differences between coaching and therapy, and between a Life Coach and a therapist.

If you have had prior counseling, you may move to Life Coaching if you and your counselor believe that the therapy was effective in helping you to accept your past issues and that you can move forward unburdened. If you are currently in the final stages of therapy, it is still advisable to discuss this with your counselor before beginning our Life Coaching. If you are in a lot of emotional pain or distress, therapy is probably a better choice. It is common to be working concurrently with both their Life Coach and therapist.

Life Coaching focuses primarily on achievement and fulfillment in the present and future. Life Coaching focuses on what happens from here forward. Therapy focuses on healing wounds from the past, and on bringing a client from dysfunction to function.

Differences between Therapy and Life Coaching

Therapy

• Assumes the client needs psychological healing.
• Roots in medicine and psychiatry.
• Works with people to achieve deep psychological self-understanding.
• Asks, “How did that make you feel?”
• Focuses on emotions and past events and circumstances.
• Explores the root of problems and offers explanations.
• Works to bring the deep unconscious into consciousness
• Works for internal resolution of pain and to let go of old psychological patterns.
• Provided in an office setting.
• Contact between sessions for crisis only.

Life Coaching

• Assumes you are emotionally and psychologically functional.
• Roots in business and personal growth venues.
• Works to motivate people to a higher level of functioning.
• Focuses on present actions and the future goals.
• Set and reach goals.
• Find more fulfillment and passion in your life.
• Reach your potential.
• Become more successful and productive.
• Stop procrastinating.
• Create a more balanced life.
• Find your life partner, if single.
• Live according to what is truly important to you.
• Focuses on a higher level of functioning.
• Results based solutions.
• Focuses on solving problems.
• Works with the conscious and subconscious mind
• Works for solutions to overcome barriers, learn new skills and implement effective changes.
• Provided over the telephone.
• Contact briefly between sessions is expected for support and accountability.

Since we do not meet face to face like therapy, how does our Life Coaching work?

My Life Coaching by telephone is called virtual coaching, where geography is not a limitation. This is very effective, and for many reasons, it is preferable to in-person Life Coaching. Methods such as IM and email offer the benefit of being able to save and print the entire dialogue for future reference.

The many years that I worked as the Director and Trainer for a suicide prevention hotline in California have polished my abilities to attend to the non-verbal elements that are not present over the phone, IM, or email.

I can effectively provide Life Coaching to people whom I will never meet face to face, while they are in the comfort of their home, office, coffee shop, or anywhere that a wireless laptop computer or cell phone can be online nearly anywhere in the world. There is no travel time. There are fewer distractions when you are in your own comfortable and safe environment.

Do you offer Life Coaching on an emergency or special project basis?

Yes, I am available for projects, activities, and other special Life Coaching emergency sessions, with adjusted fees, in between your scheduled sessions.  Since I am not your therapist, I do not offer you crisis intervention. In the U.S. you would dial 911.

I am interested. What are your Life Coaching fees?

That depends on the length of the sessions, the number of sessions per month, the coaching package, and how many months you’d like to be coached. The current fee for my one-hour individual sessions is $195. I offer sliding scale sessions depending on your capacity to pay in a manner that honors both you and me.

Paying for session packages locks your fee rate for the package duration along with a package discount. Please click on Contact Me tab to learn more, and to request your Life Coaching session.

 If I still have questions after visiting this website, may I contact you?

Yes, of course. The easiest and quickest way is to click on the Contact Me tab. You can also send an e-mail to stephenbruno@yahoo.com. If I am unable to immediately respond due to life coaching sessions or other responsibilities, I will respond within 24 hours and usually much faster!