I admit, when I first heard the term life coaching, I thought it sounded ridiculous. The dialogue went something like this:
Me: “You mean there’s some expert on life who was going to coach me to live an awesome life like they are?”
Life Coach: “But this person isn’t going to offer you any advice. Just ask questions.”
Me: “Oh, of course. An expert who isn’t going to offer any expertise.”
Life Coach: “It isn’t like that. You just have to experience it.”
And I did. Because I trusted my wife, Amois, who encouraged me to do a sample session.
And the coaching session was amazing. I still remember my first life coaching session and coaching homework.
Now more than a dozen years later, I find myself not only being a life coach, but training others to be coaches. And I see the profession and its concepts as central to a paradigm shift in education, industry, art, and culture.
We are now living in an age of clutter.
Mass production has solved the problem of not enough stuff. Factories now produce more stuff than humans can possibly consume. Houses are stuffed to the point that people need outside storage units just to store all the stuff they don’t use.
It’s not just the tangible space that’s cluttered. Consider the mental and the emotional space that gets cluttered as well. The digital age enables us copy ideas and share them as videos, posts, and tweets literally an infinite number of times.
The Internet has solved the lack of information problem but instead gave us a tremendous amount of digital clutter to sort. It’s one problem exchanged with another.
One way to consider being a life coach is to think of yourself as a space creator. Instead of giving more stuff – more advice, information, or options – you listen, ask questions, and give your client the gift of space.
In the age of clutter, the most valuable asset becomes space: tangible, mental, and emotional space.