You want to change your life. You want radical transformation: to get motivated, to be happier, to be more confident, to reach your goals; you want an awesome life. And rightfully so.

And thankfully, there are tons of useful resources to help you get there. Self-help books, blogs like Addicted2Success, podcasts, online courses, webinars, and coaches. Ah yes, coaches.

What is a life coach?

A life coach is a professional who helps you reach a goal or make a change in your life. A life coach is a motivator, a catalyst, a strategist, an accountability partner, and more. But what is life coaching really?

A life coach purports to help you in your personal growth, to help you reach your goals and find your purpose in life, to be happier and more confident, to feel more fulfilled and motivated. A life coach claims to be able to turn your life around as if by some mysterious magic.

Does life coaching actually work?

After all, coaching seems a little too-good-to-be-true. What could this person know about your life and reaching your goals that you don’t already know? Coaching sounds like it could be a whole bunch of nonsense.

But the real magic of a coach’s effectiveness comes from their training, education, intuition, conscious awareness, tools, and experience. These are the real resources that coaches draw upon to help you improve your life.

Thankfully, there is also hard data from the ICF, the world’s most highly reputed coaching organization, that coaching is indeed effective.

To help illustrate the overall effectiveness of life coaching, Life Coach Spotter recently released this infographic to help show you that coaching really does work: