Finding a life coach that has an in-depth understanding of your needs and concerns, and the barriers you experience in life, is essential to your personal evolution.
As a black individual, you may face a certain set of traumas that a white life coach might not be able to fully understand. That’s why it’s important to find a black life coach who will have the knowledge and experience needed in order to best help you.
In this guide, we will show you how to find black life coaches who you can contact online.
BetterHelp life coaching
BetterHelp is an online platform that can help you connect with an African American life coach from the comfort of your own home.
About BetterHelp life coaching
BetterHelp offers access to black life coaches who have an in-depth understanding of who you are, what you want to achieve, and the challenges that you might face as an African American.
BetterHelp currently has clients from 160 countries around the world and a team of 25,000 therapists, life coaches, and counselors. Thanks to the large variety of coaches living in many different time zones, you will be able to find a life coach who fits in with your schedule, no matter your home state or home country.
Communicating with your life coach
BetterHelp offers a wide range of options for how you meet with your life coach. You have the option to have your sessions through live video chat, audio chat, or text messaging. This allows you the flexibility to connect on the platform in a way that feels most comfortable for you.
You can also choose how you receive coaching from session to session. There may be times when you prefer to access the video chat option, and there are other times when a face-to-face experience isn’t feasible, so you opt for a text messaging session. The flexibility of BetterHelp’s coaching sessions means that you can receive support and guidance anywhere, even if you’re out in public or surrounded by family or friends.
In addition to weekly sessions with your life coach, BetterHelp offers an unlimited chat feature on its platform. Through your phone or desktop, you can opt to message your life coach between sessions if you have questions or concerns. Your certified coach can respond with feedback or send you worksheets to complete and discuss during later live sessions. This is helpful for those times when you have something to discuss, but don’t want to wait until your next scheduled session.
Other helpful bonuses
BetterHelp also offers a live journal feature. Journaling is an incredible tool to reflect on your skills and talents, understand your motivation, and clarify the goals that you want to achieve. You can opt to share your journaling with your life coach, or you can choose to keep it to yourself.
You can also join in on optional group coaching webinars on BetterHelp, led by therapists and life coaches who each have a vast amount of expertise in different areas. These workshops explore topics such as how to overcome doubt, become more self-confident in your social life, improve your public speaking, and increase self-love.
Why look for a black life coach?
Like when choosing between different therapists or other mental health professionals, it’s important that your life coach empathizes with and deeply understands the struggles that you face.
If you are Black or African American, you may face trauma, racism, and microaggressions on a day-to-day basis. These experiences can create a deeply embedded pain within, that a white counselor or life coach would never be able to truly understand. They might be able to support you and make you feel somewhat heard, but they aren’t going to be able to speak to the racial trauma that you might be facing and therefore would not be able to support you as well as a black life coach might.
Black life coaches can help you feel understood without adding intentional or unintentional prejudices. White life coaches and therapists might, at most, brush on diversity studies during their schooling. This lack of cultural competence can lead to blindness about their own prejudices, and can cause harmful stereotyping that leaves those in the African American community receiving second-rate care.
Mental healthcare has historically been a racist and prejudicial system. Black people are more likely to be misdiagnosed within the mental health field, simply because counselors and therapists are not properly trained in cultural competence. This leads to unconscious biases, which in turn lead to misunderstandings and misdiagnosis, causing unnecessary suffering for clients.
Implicit bias and racial disparities have always been a problem within the mental health community. There have been many studies done that prove black people are not given the same quality of health care as white people. While there is a spotlight on these issues, it is far from being resolved in a way that will promote sustainable equality. That’s why it’s so important to find a mental health professional who truly understands who you are and recognizes the shared experiences of trauma within the African American community that affect all of its members.
What is the difference between life coaches and therapists?
You might have heard about life coaching before, but there are a lot of misconceptions out there about what a life coach actually is and what services they provide.
In the simplest of terms, seeing a life coach helps you move forward in order to deepen your learning and personal evolution, and live a better life.
A black therapist will help you go back in time and figure out the “why” in order to grow and evolve. A psychologist, psychiatrist, or therapist provides psychotherapy interventions and helps you get to the crux of why you are experiencing the challenges that you are.
A life coach, however, is all about moving forward. You might want to set up a session with a life coach if you are in a career you enjoy but have areas of development that you would like to focus on. Or perhaps you are wanting to start your own business or practice and are looking for advice on how to make money doing something you love.
A life coach can work with you to take action to enact small, positive changes in your day-to-day life. These shifts can then lead to success within your business as well as huge transformations within your goals, relationships, and life in general.
You might also like to see a relationship coach to help you develop your networking skills, or your connections with friends/family. Or, you can see a business coach, self confidence coach, or leadership coach for help in these specific areas. Some life coaches also specialize in helping specific types of people, such as black women.
Best selling author, speaker, and certified life coach, Lisa Nichols, once said, “Self-enrichment is that act of creating a thousand micro wins, so you can have one macro win.” A life coach can help you with this by providing you with a game plan that will help to streamline the process of achieving your goals.
Conclusion
You may have a vision for how you want your future to look, but feel overwhelmed trying to figure out how to get there.
Whether you have a business goal you want to achieve, social skills you want to improve, or a personal challenge you wish to overcome, black life coaches can help you build the future you desire as an African American.
Still not sure how to find a certified life coach? Leave us a comment below and we’ll help out.
I am a freelance writer, mental health advocate, and certified meditation teacher with extensive experience in mental and emotional health. After earning my master’s degree in educational psychology, I went on to practice crisis counseling and behavioral therapy.
As a writer, my aim is to utilize my personal and professional experience in mental health to create content that helps readers feel understood and supported. I have been a contributor for The Mighty, Yahoo!, and have ghostwritten for a variety of personal development and wellness websites.
When I’m not writing, you can find me exercising, reading, or playing with my dogs, Doug and Ozzy.
