I have come across more than a thousand students in my vocation as a spiritual teacher. Few of them are happy people, most are unhappy. Ask them the source of their unhappiness and many, if not all, will tell you the root cause is issues with relationships.
If you ask them, what does this lead to? Most will tell you that the health is affected. If you ask them what has caused the trouble in relationships, they will tell you that besides the gap in their individual dispositions, one partner getting over-involved in their professional life, often foments trouble for the full family. The idea to see here is how relationships, health and professional life are all inter-connected.
THE INTER-CONNECTED LIFE
Ask yourself this question, ” What have I learnt in life the hard way?” Maybe you have learnt that we sacrifice our health to get wealth, and then, we spend all our wealth in order to get back our health. Or you have learnt that it is not enough to be technically perfect on the job and good relationships matter even more, which could get effected while establishing perfection at job.
Ask someone how their life is and they talk about their personal and professional lives as if they are two different lives; not related to each other. This is a myth and the quicker it is done away with, the better. Influenced by the myth, every time we have an issue in a particular area, we run to specialists in health or wealth or relationships. These specialists could support you in their respective areas but not without disturbing the balance in other departments of life.
Ideal is to have a go-to person who has a certain level of mastery in all of the areas of life and understands the interconnections well. A whole-life coach does a good job at that. The role of a whole-life coach is to help you live a good life by addressing all areas of life and by keeping a strong eye on the overall balance.
LIFE AS A WHOLE
A very successful finance professional was becoming a hard-driving workaholic who was driving everyone else to the edge. When he hired a whole-life coach, he discovered in coaching that he worked harder at work to prove his father wrong. His father had told him in childhood that he did not have the hunger in him to do well in life. Decades later, he was still continuing that conversation though he was no longer around. When he realised this, his life turned around.
We talk about life in fragments but our life lived is always as a whole person. Can we examine our life as a whole? To see how everything holds and connects together. And it all connects. Whole-Life Coaching is one of the best ways to explore the interconnections in our life and arrive at the root issues, rather than working at the symptoms.
COACHING IS FINDING YOUR OWN ANSWER
When Kisa Gautami fell at the Buddha’s feet and asked him to bring her dead son back to life; Buddha agreed to do so, but first asked her to fetch mustard seeds from a household that hadn’t seen a single death. Everywhere she went, Kisa saw that death spared no one. She saw how pain and suffering was core to human life. Deep compassion for all life welled up inside her. Kisa was a transformed soul. Buddha had acted as a coach by guiding Kisa to find her own answer. To help you find your own answer is the spirit of coaching.
WHAT COMES BEFORE THE ANSWER
As you know, the question comes first. And your coach helps you by asking the right questions in coaching. Does the coach ask anything that comes to mind? Not quite. The coach helps clarify even the choice of the subject or matter that you want to be coached on. All you know is that there is a challenge or a goal. The coach helps you achieve basic clarity on where you are at present – your current state. Your current state is the answer to the question – Where am I? Next, the coach helps achieve fundamental clarity on the future you want – your desired state. Your desired state is the answer to the question – Where do I want to be. There is a gap between your current state and desired state. Coaching helps you realize the gap – how big or small – and create an action plan to bridge this gap. The coach asks, listens, and clarifies.
WELL BEFORE THE FIRST COACHING QUESTION
Even before the coach has started with you, you need to ask something to yourself: Is coaching for me? In asking this question, you are coaching yourself. Everyone must find their own answer to this question. A reasonable action is to try it out once. How can you know otherwise? Finding your own answer requires awareness and responsibility. If you are willing to become aware and take responsibility for your own life, coaching works.
THE ROLE OF A COACH
A coach is a partner committed to your success. You are unique and your coach respects that. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Your coach will use his or her knowledge and experience to fine-tune a coaching plan that is perfect for you. The coaching will instill confidence in you that you have access to all the resources you need for achieving your coaching goal.
The coach provides you tips, techniques, tools, frameworks for thought and action. The coach is the ultimate resource-provider. Whatever your challenge, the coach will get out of you, a way to overcome it. The beautiful part is that the coach sees to it that you are the one who found the solution yourself with the coach’s support. This feeling instills great confidence in your own ability to overcome your challenges and create your solutions. A coach handholds when needed and lets you fall if the lesson is better learnt that way.
Your coach will also mentor you if direct advice is the need of the moment. Given his massive training and life-long learning, he has a wealth of wisdom and experience that you may not happen to have. Everything a coach does is to serve you in achieving your very best.
CHOOSING A COACH
To achieve your best starts with choosing the coach who is best for you. Before one signs up with a coach, there is a meeting – preferably face-to-face – in which you and your coach engage in a conversation. If there is a meeting of minds, and values, nothing like it. What vibes are you getting and giving each other? Is there an easy-going, natural rapport being formed? Do you feel the pull of faith and trust?
The coach best for you is the one you feel most comfortable opening up to and being vulnerable with. That is why it is important to feel you can trust your coach. In many ways, it is a gut decision. Back up your decision with a purposeful conversation that goes straight to the heart of the matter – the reasons you seek coaching, what is important to you and what is sacrosanct. Both you and your coach contribute in equal measure to form a bond of trust.
To sum up, a whole-life coach helps you see your life as a whole and live it to the fullest. He helps you create a ‘good’ life. Whether it is the struggle to get promoted, a strained relationship, an ulcer in your stomach or a work-life balance challenge, coaching makes a positive difference. The skills and wisdom of a coach combined with the keenness and receptivity of the client can do wonders for the client. And in a totally sustainable way. Give it a shot. Meet us up for a free pilot consultation. What do you have to lose? Pick your phone and drop us an SMS.
