Steamboat Springs — David Caddell found his calling in life coaching after years in other fields.

Like many life coaches, he said, he always felt pulled to help others. Caddell worked in media, music and customer service before discovering his passion. He trained at the Baraka Institute in Portland, Ore., and started working as a life coach in Steamboat Springs two months ago.

Caddell held a free session Wednesday evening called “A Life Not Yet Lived” to teach others about life coaching and his practice. Coaching is different from therapy, he said, because the client guides the experience. A life coach’s role is to help clients overcome obstacles, he said.

“As a coach, I would be asking my client what they’d like to achieve and how they see themselves progressing toward those goals,” Caddell said.

Coaching can be viewed as a ladder, he said. The goal is at the top, and the life coach is the person holding the ladder steady as the client takes steps to reach the goal.

“As a coach, I wouldn’t tell a client what to do,” Caddell said. “I would ask the client what they think they should do.”

Joe Bullock attended Wednesday’s workshop and said he’s received a coaching session from Caddell.

“It’s almost like awakening a coach in yourself,” Bullock said.

About 10 people participated in the session at Bud Werner Memorial Library. Caddell offered a sample of his services and handed out a worksheet to help people identify obstacles. Many roadblocks come from a person’s own perceptions rather than reality, Caddell said.

He demonstrated the coaching process by working through an obstacle with Bruce Gibson. At the end of the conversation, Gibson set “action steps” to take before his next meeting with Caddell.

“It was an environment where you kind of have to think about things,” Gibson said. “Where if you’re just doing it on your own, you could blow it off. It removes the option of blowing it off.”

One of the challenges of coaching is that you don’t tell the client what to do, Caddell said. You help the person determine what the obstacle is and help the person decide what to do about it.

“I don’t pretend to know more about your life than you do,” he said.

He also takes a spiritual approach to life coaching. Caddell said he thinks people have natural tendencies in life. Obstacles can come up if they don’t follow those natural tendencies. For example, a very active person might struggle in a desk job. That person could be coached to consider alternative fields.

One of Caddell’s goals is to help people realize those tendencies. He prefers the term dharma, sometimes defined as one’s life purpose.

“Part of what I try to do is find that person’s dharma,” he said, “find that gift they can bring to the world.”