Is Coaching the New Love Drug?
When we look into the idea of business or career coaching, often people think it is a group of sessions designed to help you further develop your work life.
Whilst this is fundamentally the goal of business or career coaching, it offers so much more than just ‘business strategies’.
As we explore which coach to partner with to further our work performance and satisfaction, it can become quite an emotional and intimate relationship. The space provided to the person seeking coaching needs to be safe and protected for them to share their struggles and challenges.
On a scientific level, through regular coaching sessions, your brain receives a healthy cocktail of dopamine, endorphins and oxytocin. During work, however, most of the time, our systems are flooded with stress, anxiety, adrenaline and cortisol. Action-based tasks drive us, and we forget or neglect the hormones required for things such as good decision-making, team building, trust and performance, confidence and happiness.
During regular coaching sessions, let’s say for example that a person is exploring anxiety around hiring / firing and building the right team. With the help of a coach, they can not only come away with a better understanding of how to build that team, but they will also come away with less anxiety around the subject as the uplifting chemical of endorphins gets released. A sense of well-being can be experienced through talking through the challenges of work.
Or another example - let’s say a person is feeling deflated with the business and their energy levels are low. With regular coaching sessions, the opportunity to explore this deflated energy in more detail is discussed, and then the feeling of trust comes into play with oxytocin being the main positive chemical released, and the bond between the client and the coach deepens. What makes oxytocin so powerful? It is known as the ‘love drug’ as it has the power to endorse behaviours / emotions such as trust, empathy, love, bonding and positive communication (which is needed both within a coaching environment and in the workplace).
And let’s not forget dopamine. In coaching dopamine is released, giving birth to motivation, learning and determination to accomplish goals and desires. It is the ultimate rewarding chemical! If through work, a person is procrastinating with signing a big deal or perhaps cannot focus, then not only does regular coaching help keep the client on track, they will also walk away experiencing the high of a much-needed dopamine boost, much like after exercise.
Business and Career Coaching not only helps to give the client support and direction with their business / career, but it also helps support the client on a personal level with science illustrating and showing us the successful release of these happy chemicals when receiving coaching. Regular coaching can support on a nervous system level, which perhaps can be the biggest help and support of them all.
Hi, I’m James - your Business Coach in Bristol…
As a Business Coach in Bristol, I help people who want to disrupt the(ir) status quo.
Through Career and Business Coaching, I help people who want to disrupt the(ir) status quo.