Thank you! Here's your resource: Peer Counseling and Life Coaching: An Introduction
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Hello everyone! Thank you so much for your interest and your curiosity about Peer Counseling and Life Coaching. Being open to personal exploration no small thing. Thank you for showing up — I appreciate you!
I’m June, and I created WILDKEPT to help individuals like you to explore and understand themselves better through art, nature and connection. I come to you with a background in social good – I have worked in the nonprofit sector since 2008 and I deeply value helping people, and making the world a better place. Which is why my career has turned to working with others to support their personal growth. I firmly believe that when we make a practice of exploring and developing ourselves, it gives us skills and tools to better understand others as well and that – together – has the power to make profound positive change in the world.
Engaging with a peer counselor or life coach can help with that. First, let’s explore peer counseling.
Broadly defined - Peer Counseling is when one person offers support to another person with whom they share similar experiences. Through one-on-one connection and discussion the peer counselor offers empathy, encouragement, and advice if it’s wanted. Their specialized training allows them to help the person they’re counseling with personal, professional, social or emotional challenges.
At its core, it’s being able to talk with someone who understands where you’re coming from and what you’re going through.
It’s a peer offering credible and reliable information about life issues they have direct experience with, while actively listening to your thoughts, feelings and experiences, offering support, reassurance, and sometimes helping you problem solve.
Peer counseling can be a group activity where peers are supporting each other. What I offer is a one-on-one, one-direction peer counseling. I’m supporting you through specialized training and personal experiences that may resonate with your own.
And studies show that peer counselors potentially have advantages in providing support where professionals cannot, partly because of that ability to share that credible, reliable information sharing from personal, related experience. That can be a different experience from a clinically trained professional who doesn’t have that foundation of a shared experience. There’s evidence that peer counseling can be as effective as certain kinds of counseling by clinical mental health care professionals. (Source)
My two cents: peer counseling is a great boost to any professional support you’re currently receiving. Some people have a monthly therapy appointment for example, and they throw in a couple of peer counseling sessions in between those sessions. Many people, though, for various reasons, only do peer counseling.
The benefits of peer counseling include feeling seen and supported, getting credible and reliable information from a peer, increase self-awareness and self-confidence, getting reassurance and validation with what you’re feeling and experiencing, advice (if you want it) from someone with similar experience, and a nonjudgemental environment to express your feelings.
If you’ve ever had the experience of venting about work, a relationship, parenting, whatever to someone who doesn’t have a shared experience in that area – you know how valuable that element can be, and that’s a big part of what peer counseling provides.
So, what about life coaching? I sometimes get the question “what’s the difference between peer counseling and life coaching?” or “which one should I choose between the two?”
Life coaching is a collaborative relationship between a client and a coach that helps people identify and work toward personal development goals. Life coaches can help clients in many areas including career, relationships, health and wellbeing, and work-life balance.
Like peer counselors, Life Coaches draw on their specialized training and life experiences. But instead of a less formal conversations based on shared experiences, Life Coaching is much more targeted and and results oriented. (Source)
Life coaches help people identify goals, make plans, navigate challenges. This often involves things like values and aptitude exercises, putting personal development plans on paper, and more. A peer counselor won’t give you homework – a life coach likely will.
Some common goals that come up in life coaching are things like improving communication skills, building better habits, leading a more purpose-driven life, developing leadership skills, manage stress, create work-life balance, and so on.
If you’re feeling kind of stuck and you need someone to help you organize, plan, get motivated and be held accountable a life coach can help you do that. And as it turns out, according research life coaching is pretty effective.
One study found that both individual and group coaching was helping in reducing procrastination and improving goal attainment.
Another found that health and wellness coaching boosted self-efficacy and self-empowerment.
A meta-analysis of 18 studies found coaching has significant positive impacts on all the outcomes they measured including performance and skills, wellbeing, coping, work attitudes and goal-directed self-regulation.
And more broadly, a study found 80% of people who receive coaching report increased self-confidence, and over 70% benefit from improved work performance, relationships, and more effective communication skills.
Through life coaching individuals can boost their self-confidence and self-awareness, build healthier and more reliable decision making abilities, achieve clarity on personal and professional goals and paths, find new ways to make strong/determined actions toward key objectives, and to use a sort of jargony term: maximize their potential. (Source)
So how does peer counseling and life coaching with me work?
There are four components which I’ll go into detail about, but here’s the overview: Getting the download on your goals and interests, having our one-on-one session, and then a communication follow-up.
So first – First, we’ll talk about what your goals and interests are.
In peer counseling you’ll let me know what you’d like to chat about generally, if there’s a particular shared experience you’d like to focus on, and what your goals are for the session.
In life coaching we’ll dig into what you’d like to work on, particularly personal development goals and any challenges you’re facing.
Then, we’ll set up our one-on-one session to talk.
For peer counseling, the conversation is informal. We’ll used your previous feedback for the basis of our chat.
For life coaching you may get some pre-work ahead of time to complete to jump-start our conversation or we may work on an exercise together during the session. Depending on how the session goes, may also have a suggested exercise after the session.
For either peer counseling or life coaching you may want to schedule several sessions at once, just have a one-off session, or play it by ear and schedule sessions as you like.
After your session you’ll get some follow-up communication from me, and on-going support. I’m available to answer any questions you have, and I’ll ask for your feedback on how the session went.
So! If you have the time now or if you’d like to return to this later – here’s an exercise on values that is helpful for peer counseling and life coaching. It sets a really great foundation for any personal development work.
This exercise helps you identify your values, which can then be used to help guide your path to personal development. If you’re faced with a challenge, or an opportunity, you can reflect on what actions you can take that are in alignment with your values. That will help you have confidence in your decision, and give you a better sense of fulfillment.
Often times, even if you don’t get the outcome you want in a particular situation, if you made your choices based on your values you still feel purpose-driven and have a sense of equanimity.
So this is something you can fill out – there’s a list of some common values on the next slide but you can also make your own list of values to use if you like. You might even decide to make different values list for work-life and personal-life.
The instructions are simple: for each value you rate its importance to you. Hopefully you have between 3-5 which are highly important. You may also notice a common theme between your highly important values. Highlight those – maybe put them on stickynotes, or record them in a journal, so you can reference then when you need to. (This is an abbreviated version of this exercise – a counseling or coaching session would help you delve deeper into identifying, and prioritizing your values.)
Please do remember to download the presentation or grab a screencapture of these two slides.
Enjoy!
Now what? You can find more info on peer counseling and life coaching, plus other great ways to discover yourself through nature, art and connection at wildkept.com. There’s also a form where you can get in touch with me about setting up one-on-one sessions, or you can contact me directly at hello@wildkept.com. Please do enjoy the complimentary activity and I hope to connect with you again soon!