A little coaching gets you back in the game
My horoscope today said that I have a great team of friends who are here to support me, after all it said, that is what friends are the people who don’t judge you but rather they bring out the best in you. So when a colleague/friend decided to go back to divinity school and hang out his shingle as a life coach, I knew when we were catching up that it was more than just hey, how’s it going? He really wanted to know how I was poised for the next level and what work I had completed and what I still needed to focus on.
After a battery of tests to ferret out my innate abilities, we also did a few on optimism and my inherent outlook and he said:
Your strengths include zest, appreciation, gratitude and optimism. You are hard coded to be happy on the inside whether you like it or not. This is a very good thing. In fact this combination is very rare and a huge gift.
Then he began to unpeel the layers of where I seem to be stuck, as Ellen Glasgow said, the difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions, and measuring how deep the quagmire is gives you a good blueprint for how much work it will take to get out. I candidly told him what the second and third and fourth voices were saying, even though my first voice is always saying a resounding yes to everything. He said:
Being busy and exhausted sounds like it should compromise your well-being. On paper it should make you unhappy. But your DNA is optimistic and happy. The planner in you might be catastrophe-izing the future telling you that you’re not on the ball, you should be doing something now, the future seems blurry, etc., and ultimately all of this is making you anxious (which is different than unhappy).
Then we did a session where he nudged and coaxed me and teased out of me an idea that has been gestating for many years but not acted upon, and when he brought it out to play and dusted it off, it looked like a shiny new idea, one that was worth more than a nod, but an investigation. What are you good at? What are your talents? What makes you tick? He told me I have a knack for connecting the dots, for seeing patterns where others don’t see the same thing. We talked about how much I love what I do as an investigative reporter. I was reminded of this quote by Joseph Campbell that I came across recently. “I think the person who takes a job in order to live – that is to say, for the money – has turned himself into a slave.” While I agree with Campbell, my first reaction was to feel that maybe this was a little elitist, that there are some people who can’t do what they want to do but must do what they have to do. Then I thought deeper about the path, the one where you are you, and we are all being for real, and I realized that everyone is entitled to this happiness because in life there is work for everyone. Perhaps you want to be the Madonna of fiction and that is too lofty a dream, but you can be a blogger and you can ply your trade and you can figure out how to do this. Perhaps you love nothing more than working with a team of people you have the utmost respect for and the greatest amount of fun – you can make this happen in your life with adjustments not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
A good coach knows how to coax the best out of you, not outline your every move in the game, they trust your instincts and recognize what makes the light come on and what shuts it off. I am the choleric child just as Waldorf’s Rudolf Steiner spoke about, the one that is creative and energetic, but put a lot of structure around me and I’m a bull in a china closet seeing red in every approach. My core strength is zest (and sometimes zealous-ness) to a fault sometimes, I do admit, but most times it is what makes me uniquely me and why when I’m on my game, I fall back on my favorite quote from the poet and dramatist Aeschylus who said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.”
I’m living a remarkable life, I looked around last night at a good friend and neighbor sitting nearby, at my partner (I still recall what my high school friend said when she met Tatjana, she said, how many people in the world switch teams and get it right the first time? you lucky dog!), and my kid – can you believe my little boy? – he is so awesome that he blows me away.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
[dear reader: anyone who is need of a life coach, I know a good one]