About

This blog is a place for members and graduates of the Quality of Life Therapy and Coaching (QOLTC) Academy to share observations and questions about putting QOLTC into practice. So what is QOLTC?

Quality of Life Therapy and Coaching (QOLTC) is a holistic approach to helping people increase life satisfaction. It can help whether people are overcoming major problems or just wanting good things to be better. QOLTC can help people come closer to living the lives they really want to live, thus experiencing more pleasure, involvement, purpose, and fulfillment in their day-to-day existences. Dr. Michael Frisch created QOLTC based on many years of therapy and coaching. He describes it in his 2006 book, Quality of Life Therapy: Applying a Life Satisfaction Approach to Positive Psychology and Cognitive Therapy. All quotations below are from this book.

QOLTC defines happiness as the quest for fulfillment in areas of personal importance from a position of inner abundance. Thus QOLTC assumes that happiness is both movement toward something as well as a state of mind.

“Inner abundance means feeling deeply calm, rested, centered, loving, alert, and ready to meet the challenges of the day and life after caring for oneself in a thoughtful, loving, compassionate, and comprehensive way,” (p. 78).

QOLTC is holistic because it addresses all of the following aspects of life that are important to the individual. Instead of dealing with each separately, it takes advantage emotional spillover from one area of life into another. Sometimes dissatisfactions in one area are reduced by greater awareness of satisfactions in other areas.

Children, Community, Creativity, Friends, Goals and Values, Health, Helping, Home, Learning, Love, Money, Neighborhood, Play, Relatives, Self-esteem, Work

QOLTC includes an inventory to help people assess which aspects of life are important to them and how satisfied they are with each aspect. That information helps people select from a collection of exercises and reflections the ones that match their personalities, circumstances, needs, and desires. QOLTC helps people form “happiness practices that are routine, habitual, and daily” (p. 78), and preserve quality time for themselves, that is, time to renew, relax, process worries, and keep in touch with life goals. It also helps them form meaningful goals, given that people “are happier when they find meanings or life goals to pursue that fit their unique values, skills, strengths, and interests.” (p. 86).

For more information about QOLTC including links to empirical research in a variety of settings, see the main QOLTC web site. See also a short article about one important aspect of QOLTC .