Coach as Instrument: Life as Curriculum

 This Week's Attunement 

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
— Ian Maclaren

What do you believe about why difficult things happen to us?

The losses? The pain? The trauma?

Do you believe that there is no rhyme or reason why anything happens to anyone? Do you believe we are being tested? Do you believe there is something for us to learn? What difference does it make what you believe as a coach?

What we believe as a coach matters to our clients, even if we never share it with them. Our beliefs undergird where we coach from.

What I believe about this life and what happens to us has led me to the conclusion that life itself is our curriculum. Everything that we go through is intended to support us in experiencing something benevolently intended for our growth.These beliefs support me as a coach.

As a coach, when I see life itself as curriculum, it allows me to stand back from my client's challenges and complaints du jour, look for the recurring patterns across the coaching sessions and ask myself, "What is this client's life wanting to teach them?"

"How are they choosing to learn this?"

"How can I be an advocate for the life of the client and the growth it's wanting to experience?"

When I ask myself these questions, I coach differently.

Try it out. Think of a client you've been coaching for a few months. Reflect upon the issues, challenges, and concerns your client brought to the coaching sessions over that period of time. What's the theme? If there were an experience or a lesson that their life was wanting to teach them, what would it be? How might you shift how you coach them?

We don't have to be right about what we come up with. That's not particularly important. And when we look for and illuminate the hidden patterns that pop up in our clients' lives with different "symptoms," we can accelerate their growth by working at the level of the theme or the pattern of what's wanting to be learned.

We know this is true because we can see it in our own lives. I've been keeping a 5-minute journal for over five years, writing my answers to the same prompts every day. It's allowed me to see themes/patterns of what I'm wanting to learn, like "letting it be easy" because it can be.

What about you? What is your life wanting to teach you?