Please Don’t Ask Me What I Do (I’m a Life Coach and it’s Complicated)

“Don’t tell them you’re a life coach,” my husband said as I nervously prepared for my first in person networking event.  “They don’t know what that means.”

My own insecurities fueled this conversation, unsure how to introduce myself to a room full of bankers, photographers, plumbers and businessmen at my local Chamber of Commerce…a group I recently joined not so much to get clients but to simply get out from behind my desk and meet real people in the real world.

After spending my entire business behind a screen, stepping out into the “real world” felt terribly awkward. 

How do I explain life coaching  to “regular people” who haven’t even heard of the coaching industry?

To this day, most of my friends have no idea what I actually do (and few bother to ask) and it’s just easier if I don’t talk about it.

But lately, I’m grounding more powerfully into my work.

Maybe it’s because I’ve done it long enough to see the undeniable impact on real women’s lives, or maybe I’ve simply outgrown my own insecurities…either way I’m done minimizing my business and hiding the depth of my work behind polished descriptors the general public can understand. 

I’m a life coach, and I help women change their entire lives. 

I help women find the meaning they search for in all the wrong places.  I give purpose to their pain, a path back to their power, and permission to be who they really are in a world who wants them small, self sacrificing, and silent. 

What I’ve come to know is this…

We’re all suffering and searching for answers to questions we can feel but can’t articulate. Big aches, big fears, and big questions we’re terrified to even consider…afraid we don’t have the time to explore and even more afraid of what we might find if we did.

These questions will not stop, shrink or get smaller. They only get louder until we stop and listen.  It is in our nature to want to understand ourselves.  We are meant to go beyond skin deep, below the surface of small talk and superficial accomplishments to find the truth of who we are. 

In a Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl says we’re asking the wrong questions.  Instead of asking “what is the meaning of life” we must recognize that Life is asking us…

What meaning will YOU give to YOUR life?

Artists, poets and philosophers have attempted to quantify what it means to be alive. To put into music, paint or prose the sweet anguish of our existence, not to figure it out or paint it away, but simply to explore and express it all.

We search for meaning in our careers and in motherhood and while meaning can be found there, it doesn’t solely exist within the achievements and evangelical embodiment of perfection we’ve been sold.

What meaning will YOU find?

This is our question. The deepest ache.  Not, “what does it all mean,” but “how do I give it all meaning?”

There was a time we didn’t medicalize the existential questions of our existence.  

We didn’t seek a diagnosis, label or prescription to medicate away what it means to be human.  Our fear, depression, anxiety, and discontentment wasn’t a sign of brokenness but disconnection with something more.

We didn’t run from our pain, we ran towards it so we could understand ourselves deeper and find the meaning that gives our lives purpose. 

Instead of looking for relief in avoidance, perfectionism, prescriptions or Pinot Noir, we turned to those with deeper spiritual wisdom, a pastor, elder or tribesman, not to cure the pain that is to live, but to better understand what it means to be alive.  

We looked to those who came before us….

I’m a life coach, and I’m finally really proud to say it. I mean, is there anything more brave, anything more powerful than to say…

“I will go first into the dark, into the ache, into the questions we’ve all been taught to avoid. And I’ll come back with clarity, a torch of truth, and a lantern to light the way for those still searching.”

What sacred, hallowed work is to coach one through life.

Just as doulas hold sacred space during beginnings and endings and shamans bridge the gap between the seen and unseen, a life coach bridges the space between a life driven by action and expectation into one led by meaning, purpose, and deep inner alignment.

I’m here to show women what I’ve learned.  I’m here to usher you out of the world that demands and drains you and inside the shelter of your own wisdom, so you can find exactly what the world can never give you. 

I’ll never again cringe when someone asks what I do.

I’ll hold fast and sacred the work of coaching someone through life…into themselves, into their truth, so they may decide how to create the most meaningful life they can imagine.

So no. 

I will not shrink. I will not flinch. I will not explain away the value of what I do and what meaning this work has done for me.  

I am a life coach, a title once said with caveats, but today I declare with pride because maybe, more so than when I began, I know exactly what it means to truly live.