You are reading ‘Like person, like coach’, a newsletter about becoming the coach you are whilst trying to contribute to a better world.
“Life happens when the tectonic power of your speechless soul breaks through the dead habits of the mind.”
― John Patrick Shanley, Doubt, a Parable
Recently one of my favourite movies is Doubt. (cw: abuse) Without describing the topic, it’s a movie that speaks visually and thematically to trusting oneself when the facts aren’t there to back you up. It takes intuition and hunches and turns them from invisble and ellusive inner forces into synchronicities outside of the self that become the crumbs of faith.
I’ve watched this movies a couple of times since I started transitioning. Throughout the last five years of coming out to myself and the world around me, I’ve had a whirlwind relationship with doubt —most times I’ve been drowned by it. And even though it’s been excruciating, nothing has ever bolstered my faith as much.
Often times, we know the changes we need to make in our lives. On a very emboddied level we have certainty. But life doesn’t happen there, it happens at an intersection with the world, and that’s also where change is navigated in coaching. Once we get the courage to leap we are led by the Fool (tarot symbol) spirit which like my friend Dessy says, is probably the only way we’d jump into life-changing endeavours - by being, to a certain extent, oblivious to what they will ask of us.
We’re not really ready to change. At least not in the way that change will actually change us. We imagine what it might be like and what we’d like to get out of the change, but there’s a gap between these imagined possibilities and the reality we encounter. As a coach, this experience makes me pay more attention to how I hold change: with less force, less of a need for outcomes, less married to making sense and more committed to presence, stillness and connection.
Making changes in one’s life no longer feels like just an exercise of will and motivation, but more of a being taken over, a surrendering. I wonder how I might become a coach who respects the astounding depth of this? Often, towards the end of coaching work we scramble for evidence that our effort was worth it. Maybe change looks very different to what we imagined. Here’s to trusting the shape it takes.
“Doubt requires more courage than conviction does, and more energy; because conviction is a resting place and doubt is infinite - it is a passionate exercise.”
― John Patrick Shanley
Links I recommend this week:
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