Day 275 of 1827: Graduating from Life Coaching

This afternoon I had my final session with my life coach Heather Rem.

When we started today’s Skype call, she asked me, “What do you want to get out of this call?”

Twice a month for the last year, she’s been asking me this question… and for the first time, I didn’t know how to answer it.

My work is going great, my social network is growing, I’m making good progress on my 2013 goals…. Sure, there’s room for improvement, but honestly, if I just keep doing what I’m doing, everything’s going to be amazing.

So… I guess that’s that; the coaching has been a success.

It’s always a little weird when you come to the end of a long process. I worked with Heather since a couple of months before I left the US. Every two weeks we would have a Skype call (and one time we met in person — an encounter that resulted in a major breakthrough in my personal development).

Every two weeks for the past year.

Well, the unexamined life is not worth living. Let’s do a quick post-mortem and see how things went.

What are some of the benefits that I gained from working with a life coach?

Support: When you’re starting out with a new lifestyle or career, it can be a little overwhelming, and it’s hard to know the difference between, “This is new and unfamiliar,” and, “This is something that I could be doing differently.”
Heather has been fantastic at helping me learn how to identify the difference between things that need to be adjusted… and the things that I need to adjust to. As a result, I can approach unfamiliar situations and projects with confidence and curiosity.
Learning to Trust Myself: This one was really hard to learn because I was taught not to trust myself when I was a child and for most of my early adulthood.
Heather helped me to radically change my perspective. Instead of judging myself and being critical of my setbacks, I learned how to be patient with myself and to view my experiences as a process of self-discovery. Instead of trying to find ways to make things work, I am discovering the ways that work for me.
Coming to Terms with My Impatience: I am a very impatient person. It’s one of my greatest strengths.
For a long time, I thought there was something wrong with me because I have an incredibly difficult time sustaining my interest in a project or job once it started getting difficult. But really, this is a great strength because it gives me a very efficient and effective way to determine what works for me and what doesn’t.

I remember during one session a few months ago, I was concerned because it seemed to me like I wasn’t being very productive. I felt like I wasn’t getting anything done, and my life had fallen into a rut.

To that, Heather replied, “Phoenix, you’ve changed countries like 18 times in the last couple of months. You’ve done more in a few weeks than most people do in a few years!”

I had to admit that she had a point there.

It took about a year for me to integrate these lessons into my life, but now here I am, and it’s incredible the changes that have happened to me as a result.

What were some of the challenges that I faced during the coaching process?

Self-Direction: I’ve worked with two different life coaches now, and one of the things that simultaneously annoys and satisfies me is that I am the one in charge of how each session goes.
Every session starts out the same way: “What do you want to accomplish during this call today?”

Now, why does this annoy me? Well, let’s just say that when I’m paying for a service, I don’t want to have to tell the service provider how to do her job — that’s why I’m paying her, right?

But of course, there’s a contradiction in that.

Heather’s job was first and foremost to cultivate a sense of autonomy and self-confidence in me. If she had laid out a process for me to follow and called all the shots, then we would have achieved exactly the opposite of that.
Keeping the Focus on the Concepts: During my calls with Heather, it was very easy to fall into the trap of just talking about “what’s going on”. I would tell Heather about the things that were happening in my life and maybe ask her a couple of questions about how to proceed with anything I wasn’t sure about.
This is useful, but it’s not where the real value in having a life coach is.

Ultimately, I don’t want to use my life coach like a crutch. If I am relying on my life coach to tell me what to do, then not only am I not taking full advantage of my sessions, but I’m also sabotaging my ability to make decisions on my own.

Fortunately, Heather has been really good at redirecting the focus to the life lessons that I needed to learn, and slowly but surely I integrated the key concepts to take things to the next level.
Technical Difficulties: Doing sessions over Skype usually works really well, but every now and then the internet gave up on us. There’s nothing more frustrating than getting disconnected right in the middle of a really profound conversation.

I might continue with a coach sometime in the future; maybe I’ll reach a point where I could use a little extra support to “level up” once again (:

If I were to do it over again, there are a couple of things I would do differently:

Come Prepared: To get the most value out of each session, it would have been really helpful for me to decide ahead of time what topics and issues needed attention. If I could do it over again, I would review previous call notes before each session and write out a list of the areas that I wanted to focus on.
Stick to the Big Picture: It’s good to get guidance on specific problems from time to time, but I think I would have gotten a lot more value out of my coaching if I had tried to tie everything back to the core virtues I was trying to develop.
As I mentioned above, Heather was really good at helping me with this, so I was still able to make good progress even during sessions where I was particularly unfocused. However, had I made a more conscious effort to stick to the important topics, I think I could have graduated from life coaching even faster.

As I look back, I can’t help but feel incredibly satisfied with how things have gone over the past 12 months. Of course, I’ve made a ton of changes in my life that have played a role in shaping the person I am today, but having Heather as my life coach has been a big help.

Incidentally, if you are in the process of taking your professional life to the next level and think you might benefit from having the support of a life coach, you might like to get in touch with Heather and see if she can help you make it happen.