[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]I[/su_dropcap] am a life coach. I only have one client, and I see him every day. That client is me. You are also a life coach, with at least one client.
Actually, that’s not true; we all have many clients. Except that we don’t call them clients; we call them friends. And, we never actually get around to sending them a bill. Why would we?
No matter how mysterious and magical we’ve come to believe life coaching is, all a life coach really does is to make a game out of coaxing as much joy out of another person as possible. But the interesting part is that the more joy I coax out of others, the more joy I end up with in the process. That is payment of a sort that money can never match. Life coaching is nothing more than caring…. about yourself. Because you’re always on both sides of the process.
I like games. And I like having more joy in my life. So do you, I assume. So what is the difference between that and being a life coach? No difference. But we believe there is a difference because of this:
Instead of playing a game and inviting more joy into our own lives by coaxing more joy out of others, we choose instead to give into the ambition to make everyone just like the version of us our ego demands.
Think about how we size up others that we encounter in life. The more like us they are, the more we are willing to offer them our “friendship”; the less like us they are, the less willing we are. This is how the ego justifies itself. But it isn’t you, and it isn’t loving or caring or anything like friendship. But here’s the really shocking part: we don’t really know who we are anyway. Most of us only know who the ego demands that we be. Consider that difference.
If you are an authentic human, this thing called “who you are” is fluid and changeable from one moment to the next. That just describes a bigger version of you. That is how great actors create characters and why they are so compelling to watch. And that is how you become a more authentic human; also compelling to watch and be around.
So, what if, instead, we just decided to let others be who they are and who they are not, and refuse to participate in the process of judging them based on how much like us they are. In fact, what if we actually encouraged them to be as different from us as they wanted to be? Because real personal development for all of us is to become as different from the ego’s version as possible. That is how everyone wins in the game of life coaching. Especially the coach.
When did life coaching become a profession rather than just the way we all treat each other? I will work for the day when there is no longer a thing called Life Coaching; when we all realize that this is what naturally transpires between humans who no longer have an interest in requiring others to be like them in return for friendship. A day when we are all life coaches, and we are all clients. And we all experience richer lives in the process. And, instead of coaches and clients, we simply call each other friends.
