Exercise – set a 30 min timer. Write about my connection to service and my purpose with respect to being a professional coach. Here are the unedited results (I naturally do some editing on the fly, but nothing has been changed since the timer went off)
What is the service? How am I in service? Why do I believe I have any power or facility to help people through coaching. What is coaching?
These are questions I wrestle with on the day (and sometimes weeks) where I offer what I do and don’t have any takers. I look at what I’m doing, why, what’s my motivation.
What is coaching? What is the service? This is both the easiest and the hardest question to answer because it’s simple yet doesn’t lend itself to pithy marketing.
The main thing I do is put my attention very intently and completely on another human being. They talk. About their lives, their conflicts, their insecurities, judgements, doubts, fears, triumphs, joys, confusions, etc.
I watch my clients fog themselves to the point of obfuscating truths about themselves and/or their situations. Truths that, with a little time and attention, are easily revealed. I reflect back to them how they sound, how they act, their body language. I provide a holotropic mirror in which they can see (and hear) themselves more clearly. Most of what keeps us held in patterns and “failure” is our own conditioning. Our conditioning lies to us in our own voice, and as my therapist keeps pointing out, about 60% of our available bandwidth is taken up by our conditioning unconsciously keeping out attention off all the behaviors and aspects of ourselves that we find too painful to see.
Why do I do this? Let’s be honest. I’m fascinated with my own process of growth and awakening. I delight in seeing what’s possible in other human beings so that I remember every day what’s possible in myself. So yes, a large portion of it is selfish. I want to gain enough awareness of who I am and how I limit myself so that I may unfold into the greatest version of myself that’s possible in this lifetime.
The irony here is, probably the best version of myself is one who is in service. I have a heart of service. I am at my best when my attention is out and I am being well used by people whom I see giving my attention to is a good investment.
What do I get out of service? I have seen the quality of life that transformation, real, deep transformation, brings to people. I have seen the powerful combination of therapy and coaching abolish neurosis and fear that eats up a person’s energy and time and happiness. I have seen women change from fragile or angry beings into confident, loving, powerful beings.
Ach. None of this is very vulnerable. It’s all for the audience. It’s not the truth. The truth is I love everyone. I love love love everyone, and it kills me. As I have learned how to open my heart, how to see and hear people more deeply and fully, I am inundated with pain and fear and misery. All I want to do is stay on the journey of my own healing and do what I can to help others stay on their own journey of healing. Through healing trauma, through the deconstruction of conditioning, we gain choice, we gain freedom. As I’ve learned more and more about my own prison, as I’ve witnessed countless people that I’ve been close to and care about either choose to be free or remain in their own prisons, I feel driven to be of service. So many have come before me who have helped and held me. It took many years of hard and consistent work to learn to let love in. How can I live in this world with these skills and not do the same for others?
Hell, even underneath all that, the simplest truth I can give is that this is what I’m supposed to do. It’s what I’ve always done. it’s who I’ve always been. When I was considering signing up for the year long training to become a coach, the thought that tipped me over into “yes” was simply: You’ve done this as an amateur your whole life. People come to you to talk to you, to have you listen, to have you reflect to them and give them advice. You love it, it’s fulfilling to help people in this way. Let’s get trained so we can do it professionally. In that training, one thing I learned is NOT to give advice, LOL. I took the skills I had accidentally developed as a child and young adult, and aimed them at people who were in real emotional turmoil and pain. As a child I learned to take apart broken things and put them back together in working order. Then as a teenager, I used my listening skills to get the attention from girls I didn’t think I deserved. Now, I take apart the machinery of deep conditioning, and help people discard the pieces that no longer serve them, integrate more consciously the pieces that are working, and create from scratch the pieces to fill the new empty spaces.
Also published on Medium.
