Finding Your Way Back to Yourself – Part Three

I’ve noticed something in the conversations I’ve been having lately. When someone asks me whether life coaching is right for them, there’s often a quieter question sitting underneath it, and it sounds something like: is my life bad enough yet?

It’s as though support is something we can only claim once we’ve gathered enough evidence that we’re not coping, as though there’s a line we have to cross before we’re allowed to ask for help. I’ve come to believe we have this the wrong way round. You don’t have to wait until you’re falling apart before you deserve support, and, if I’m honest, it’s often better not to.

Something I’ve been learning from paperwork

This might seem an unlikely place to start, but bear with me.

At the moment my brother and I are going through the process of applying for a deputyship order for our elderly father. A few years ago, when it would have been relatively straightforward, Dad didn’t want to complete a lasting power of attorney. I don’t think that was stubbornness; I think he was scared. I’ve seen this in a lot of older people: as the time approaches when they might begin to lose capacity, facing it head on suddenly becomes frightening and overwhelming, so it gets put off. A deputyship order is what happens after someone has lost capacity, and it’s a far more complicated, difficult and painful process for everyone involved.

Meanwhile my husband and I, in our mid-fifties, have agreed that within the next year we’ll complete our own lasting powers of attorney. Not because anything is wrong, but because it’s so much easier, so much less emotional and so much less painful to do it now, long before our children will ever need it.

I’ve been wondering whether coaching can be a little like that. If you are falling apart, and that’s when you reach out, then that’s absolutely fine, and the right person will meet you exactly where you are and support you. But life is messy. Difficult times will always come along, and most of us know our own patterns well enough to recognise that we go through good bits and harder bits. So perhaps the space in between the messy bits is actually the right time to think about life coaching. It’s when there’s room to think, rather than simply survive.

(Therapy can be a slightly different conversation, and I’ll be exploring the difference between coaching and therapy in the next part of this series.)

Life coaching, a bit like a personal trainer

There’s a story I tell often, because it captures something I’d love more of us to feel about support.

Some years ago I began working with a teenager of fifteen who was struggling with depression and anxiety and was taking antidepressants at the time. We did some really deep work together. I love working with teenagers, partly because the leaps they make and the realisations they come to can be huge; they’re right at the beginning of learning about life and about themselves.

Something I’ve noticed with quite a few of the young people I’ve worked with is that they’ll arrive telling me they’re depressed, that they feel sad all the time and have done for as long as they can remember. When I gently ask them to give me a percentage, to tell me how much of the last week they’ve actually felt that way, the picture usually becomes more complex and more nuanced. I do wonder whether social media has a lot to answer for here, because so many young people seem to have absorbed the idea that we’re supposed to feel happy all the time, and that if we don’t, something must be wrong with us.

Exploring the whole range of emotions with them is some of the most rewarding work I do. These days, having done a fair bit of my own work, most of the time I feel a quiet, calm contentment. It isn’t joyful or mind-blowingly amazing, but it leaves room for moments of joy, and I have those regularly throughout my week, whether I’m walking the dogs or have just had a great session with a client. And when difficult things happen, I feel the emotions that fit them. That, it seems to me, is a much more realistic thing to hope for than permanent happiness.

In time, that teenager came off their antidepressants with their doctors agreement, learnt some tools that will stay with them for life, and went off to get on with things. A bit of anxiety crept in before their A levels, so we had a few sessions and got them back on track. There was another bump halfway through university, and again a few sessions were enough to remind them of what they already knew. They’re now in their early thirties, which makes this a very long working relationship, and these days they treat me rather like a personal trainer at the gym.

Looking after ourselves before things go wrong

I think that’s such a wonderful place to be. Imagine if we looked after our mental and emotional wellbeing in the same way we look after our physical fitness. You work out regularly and keep a reasonable level of fitness, and then life happens: you get a promotion, work gets busy, you have kids; the exercise drops off and you feel a little less fit than you’d like. So what do you do? You book a few sessions with a personal trainer to get yourself back on track. Nobody assumes something has gone terribly wrong.

That’s what I love about working with people in this way. They’ll get in touch and say, “I’ve hit a bit of a bump, can we book a few sessions?” Quite a lot of my clients, once we’ve finished a programme or a block of sessions, book a monthly check-in call. Some months things are going well and they don’t need it, so they cancel with the usual notice, and then we pick up again when it’s useful.

Why so many women wait

When women hold back from getting support, I’ve come to believe it’s rarely really about the money. More often it’s that they find it incredibly hard to put themselves first. There’s always something that comes before them: the children’s school dinners need paying for, someone needs new shoes, there’s a hen do coming up. The guilt works on two fronts, too, because it’s guilt about spending the money and guilt about spending the time.

Underneath that there’s often a feeling that they should be able to cope. They’re usually the ones holding everyone else together, and over the years it can become deeply ingrained that they don’t deserve to have someone holding them. Which is, of course, exactly where I come in.

I’ve also noticed what might be a bit of a gender split in when people reach out. The men I work with are more likely to come to me in the middle of a crisis. Women, more often, come once they’ve weathered so many crises that everything has compounded, and they’ve reached a point where they feel they’ve completely lost themselves. We tend to put up with an awful lot before we finally ask, and the biggest barrier, again and again, is that guilt about prioritising our own time and our own money.

Why I always have support of my own

Something that sometimes surprises people is that I’m always in some sort of coaching or therapy myself. It’s a constant in my life. I always have someone, on a regular basis, who can hold space for me and help me process whatever has come up. Usually it’s nothing terrible or life-changing, just the ordinary ups and downs of being a person.

What I’ve learned is that I get my best results and my deepest insights when the mess has already been dealt with, when I’m not in the middle of firefighting and there’s room to look a little further. It’s almost as though you need to do the work to realise that you need to do the work. I’m not sure that entirely makes sense written down, but I suspect some of you will know exactly what I mean.

So how do you know if life coaching is right for you?

I’d go back to something I wrote about in How to Choose the Right Life Coach: talk to a few coaches, get a feel for them, and notice how you respond instinctively. This is really about trusting your own inner wisdom. I think we’re all able to feel that inner yes and that inner no when we give ourselves the chance to listen.

If the answer feels like a no, it’s worth getting curious about it rather than taking it at face value. Is it fear? Is it the guilt of putting yourself first? Is it a worry that starting would mean finally admitting how much you haven’t been coping? Or is it simply that this doesn’t feel right, for you, right now? Each of those is useful information, and only you can tell the difference.

If you’re asking yourself whether life coaching is right for you, the two questions I’d invite you to sit with are fairly simple: Would this support be genuinely helpful for me at the moment? And, if you can put the guilt to one side for a moment, do I believe I deserve it?

I can’t tell you whether life coaching is right for you, and I’d be a little wary of anyone who claims they can. What I can say is that you don’t have to wait until things are bad enough. You don’t have to have fallen apart first, and you don’t have to have earned it.

If you’re curious but wondering what working together would actually look like, I’ve written about that in What to Expect from Your First Coaching Session.

Something to reflect on

If you didn’t have to wait until things were bad enough, what kind of support would you let yourself have?

If you’d like a quiet first step, my free Gentle Boundaries Check-In is a good place to start: Click here to get it.