Bullied By Life Coaching

Hello Dominique,

I noticed your fear about being bullied with life coaching, so I wanted to send you a quickie to say that coaching is not about telling you what to do. Good coaches will even resist giving you ideas about what you might do.

The coach's job is not to direct their clients, but to find ways to help clients discover what you want and how to get it. You're always in control, but your coach adds the value (and ultimately makes the difference) by challenging your distorted beliefs and thinking, allowing you to see reality more accurately, and so to find better choices for your life.

Something brought you to my website, and so I guess you're looking for help. I hope my assurance above removes your objection because I promise you that it's not well-founded.

In fact, this itself is an example of how coaches work. I hope I've succeeded in removing a FEAR (False Expectation Appearing Real) from your mind, and if I've done that, then you are now freer to see the world (at least this part of it) more clearly.

But if I haven't, then this may evidence a kind of rigid thinking we call "mistaken certainty".

Human beings often try to protect their self images in the face of life's hammer blows in a variety of ways. One of those ways is to build a world-view which supports our self-image in some way. Sometimes, in order to bury an uncomfortable truth, it feels necessary to describe how things are in a certain way. That description is a distortion, but we prefer it to reality, because it hides something we don't like. This whole process is not done consciously, but it IS done.

Examples of common distortions I see often are:

• "All women are treacherous - I'll have no truck with them" - this one usually buries "I was hurt terribly by a woman and I'm afraid of enduring that again". The cost of maintaining the distortion is a life without love.
  
• "The rich get their money by abusing the poor" - which hides "I'm poor, and I feel like a failure". The price of this distortion is that its owner will not strive to be all they can be, and they'll hate the un-just world they live in all their lives.

• "I was not meant to succeed" (AKA low self esteem) - which hides "Putting myself out there risks failure and humiliation and the confirmation that I really am not meant for success". The price of maintaining it is that your low self esteem feeds on it's own tail and deepened causing depression and other symptoms, which also paralysing the client from taking the opportunities which life offers.

I hope that makes sense, Dominique. It's big stuff.