Life Coaching

Recently I listened to this podcast discussing about coaching and it struck me how coaching is like having your family behind you, most of the time. To be clear, coaching here is not the sport coaching where a coach teaches the team the game plan and shouts from the sideline, but this coach talks about your goal and position in life, hence the term life coach.

Honestly I think the term and concept is a bit bullshitty at first, and most likely be a smart aleck giving anecdotes during conversations and you will feel happy and inflated for a while, but feels dejected after it, similar to the way motivation camps during schoolyears used to do. And the podcast also approached it in similar way (although the interviewer admitted he himself takes coaching and just being hard on the interviewee), the interviewee did manage to answer all the questions fluidly. I guess you need to be a smooth talker to able to sell that as a service, but still, the answers do make sense.

My takeaway is that the life coach mostly do not know the answers to their client’s life, but they are quite accomplished in their own ways and knows the right question to ask. And, here’s the killer, the client themselves already know the answers to the questions!
It is in certain way, just a matter of voicing it out and being honest with yourself.

After listening to the podcast/interview, I still think the service of life coach itself is wishy-washy, because it depends on the coach and I don’t think I see the need for it, but then I realized that I have been experiencing it myself my whole life. Growing up, I was the youngest in a family of six, with age gap of 5 to 15 years between the next youngest and eldest siblings, and this created a bit of a secondary parenting dynamics. I remember vaguely being questioned what I am doing, and how am I achieving something, and more clearly during my high school where my brothers and sisters were asking me what I would like to do after school, i.e. what am I going to study in the university. The questions were casual and normally the comments were that I would know what to do, just “have you thought of this and that” peppered along.

Nowadays my siblings come to me, and asks me to talk to their children, arguing that I am closer to their age. I guess life comes back around.

Wait, does this mean I am life coach now? Hopefully not, and I think you don’t need to be labelled so to talk to people about how their life is doing and how they are feeling. Instead of being a life coach, let’s be human instead.

Thank you for reading.