The first thing my life coach said to me was that life coaching would not offer any instructions, directives or advice.
This felt like a bit of a linguistic bait-and-switch — the term “life coach” had suggested to me exactly those services. But I figured that I should nod and smile and hear her out. First, because coaching is a booming business that has apparently changed many people’s lives and careers in the last few years, and I wanted to observe up close how this alchemy happens. And second, because this hourlong session was going to cost $500, so what kind of maniac would I be to not try to squeeze the full iPad’s worth of value out of it?
Of the many types of paid professional guidance available these days, life coaching, I imagined, would fall somewhere in between tarot-card reading and psychotherapy. It would be as if a therapist listened to your problems … and then actually offered opinions on what you should do. But within minutes of our first Zoom call, my life coach — Marianna Lead, a “Master Certified Coach” whom I had selected through the International Coaching Federation’s website based off the almost mystic appropriateness of her last name — disabused me of that notion.
“What is your vision for your future?” Lead said. “How would you like it to evolve? If a client asks me, ‘So what do you think I should do,’ it means I didn’t do a good job.”
“So … oh,” I said.
She went on: “You’re going to leave each session with certain steps and actions that you’re going to want to take, but not because I tell you to. Because you’re going to process it all and go, ‘Now I have clarity.’”
“Right,” I said, trying my hardest to assemble my face into an expression of someone who does have an actual vision for her future and even possibly an evolution plan for it.
“So,” Lead said, “what are some of the problems you’re looking to solve?”
Into the silence that followed, I blurted what I can only summarize to you as a swampy sewer puddle of emotion. I won’t recount every single complaint that I spouted off to her, for one thing because coach-client confidentiality thank you!, and for another thing because the comically broad scope of said problems would exceed the actual amount of space available to this magazine column. But I will say a great deal of them had to do with feeling incredibly overwhelmed lately. By responsibilities. By deadlines, by money, by relationships. By envy, by doubt, by the visionless future, by guilt and annoyance about my own unruly distress about all of the above.
Lead absorbed all this with dignity, occasionally pointing out that I was saying the words “crammed” and “afraid” a lot. Then, at the end of the hour, she prompted me to come to the next session with an idea of what I was going to do about this doomsday stress vortex.
What I was going to do? What was I?
An impossible question. What was the point of having someone else in the picture?
But, given this homework, I spent the week dwelling upon it. By the next half-a-Rimowa-suitcase-priced coaching session, I had a feeble half-answer: I was going to … get out of the vortex. Somehow. I would shake off every one of these anxieties with the alacrity of a golden retriever coming indoors after rain.
“Great,” Lead said. “Now what can be accomplished toward that goal in this single hour?” The creation of a strategy? I ventured. “What would that strategy look like?” Lead said. And so I threw out some ideas: breathing exercises, sorting my to-do list by order of time sensitivity. Lead chipped in too, suggesting I could use a mental picture of putting non-urgent demands away in a desk drawer. She praised my talent for organization and my attention to detail. Afterward, she emailed me a bullet-pointed list of everything we’d brainstormed, signing off with “I look forward to continuing our conversation next week. 
”
On our third call, I admitted, shamefaced, that I’d only done half of the self-assigned coping mechanisms. “Well,” Lead said gently, “we have to count the wins, right?”
The closest I’ve ever been to athleticism is watching all the seasons of “Friday Night Lights.” My childhood extracurriculars tended toward solo activities like music and writing — when there were adults involved, they were evaluating or grading or watching from a distance — and it was odd to discover so late in life that the jock kids had gotten access to an entire category of human relationship that I had not been privy to: the preternaturally upbeat, score-keeping, progress-tracking, encouragement-barking sports coach.
Once I had a coach, everything took on the thrill of athletics. The attachment of the word “coach” alone to my problems turned the problems into finish lines, trophies to chase, enemies to be conquered. I was running drills on my emotional hypersensitivity; my self-criticism was a performance bottleneck. And every once in a while when I was really dropping the ball, I got a pep talk: Again! Faster! You can do better! Here’s what we’re working on this week. What happened out there? Each week, Lead was there on the sidelines to help guide me through the sport of my own life.
In therapy, it is possible to talk for hours or even years on end without coming up with solutions. Some therapists downright refuse to use words like “solutions.” But in the improvement-minded, accountability-heavy world of life coaching, stalling on personal development is not really an option. Solutions are all there is. Unless you’re happy to toss thousands of your dollars away for nothing.
Perhaps the modern-day popularity of paid coaching — not just behavioral or mental-health coaching but also executive coaching, nutrition coaching, relationship coaching, financial coaching — is because people stop automatically getting that kind of high-school-basketball-coach attention as they grow up. Now we are now trying our hardest to recreate that relationship with an entire cottage industry. When you are 12, there might be a dozen people assigned specifically to care about your personal improvement; that number shrinks quite a lot, possibly even to zero, by the time you are 30 or 50 or 80.
It made me think that you or I could stand to do more of this for the people already in our lives. That maybe we should all sign up to be life coaches for one another.
But then, I thought, considering how much work this would be, I definitely wouldn’t do it for free.
The post I Thought Life Coaching Would Be Like Therapy but It’s Actually More Like … Football? appeared first on New York Times.
