Why Coaching To Help Others Is DANGEROUS!
The Biggest Obstacle For Most Coaches
(and service-oriented people in other professions, too)
People often become life coaches with the primary aim of helping others and changing the world for the better. But this is actually a recipe for disaster.
When we want to help others, this is really our own internal guidance wanting to help us in the ways we believe we want to help others. The advice we most want to give others is the advice we ideally would take ourselves. Our advice is what we most need to hear. Our lessons that we try to teach others are the ones we most need to receive and implement ourselves.
When we want to change the world, this is actually our own internal guidance wanting to change the world we’ve created for ourselves. What we really want is not to change the world outside us, but to change the world inside us. We want to change not the world, but our world.
When we try to help others and change the world from the feeling of the desire to do this, and we fail to change ourselves and our world, we cannot experience anything in the mirror of our clients and our world but our own failure to change.
And so we try to help others change, and session after session we find ourselves discussing the same issues and not getting very far very fast at all.
Here’s what often ends up happening in this case:
- We coaches try to accommodate our clients, and so:
- We schedule sessions when they want to schedule them even if it’s not so good for us because we want to be available for them when they want to speak with us.
- We hold longer sessions without charging our clients for extra time because we really want to do what we can to help them along into a better place as fast as possible.
- We lower our rates to accommodate what we believe our clients can afford.
- We accept late payments because we try to be understanding of their financial situations, and sometimes end up not getting paid at all.
None of this is good for our clients or for us. In the end, our clients don’t implement the lessons we discuss together and therefore they don’t change their circumstances as they reflect what we’re doing. They hold themselves back as we are doing to ourselves, and so we are actually helping them stay where they are as we stay where we are, wanting change and not achieving it.
So if not to help others, why should we coach?
The answer:
Because we enjoy it, because it makes us feel good, because we’re fulfilled by it. Because we feel like at the end of our lives, we would feel better to have been coaching than to have been doing anything else with our time and our lives.
From the perspective of our previous mindset of coaching to help others, this new motivation might seem selfish, but it is actually the only selfless way to be.
If we coach because we enjoy it and simply feel good doing it, we’ll help other people enjoy their lives more by our example. And this is the most powerful change we can help them make — to learn to live with and from joy, passion, purpose, and love for their lives and for what they spend their time doing.
To be motivated by what we would feel good afterward having done is the greatest motivation that we can allow to drive us, and our clients will thrive if this is the example we set.
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Whether you’re a coach, yourself, or not, if you’re seeking a coach, you’re in luck because you’ve found one! Contact me at 516–500–3728, jonathan@lifechanginglifecoaching.com, or www.inspirationallifeguidance.com to schedule a session and learn how to make your life even more joyful, purposeful, and fulfilling than it currently is.
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