Meditation on Life Coaching

The New York Times has a pretty good article on life coaches and what they do. I particularly like the fact that the coach they feature most prominently comes, as I do, from a business background: many coaches come from a social work or psychotherapy background, and while those skills are essential, I don’t think they’re sufficient. I find that my strategic and business knowledge are particularly helplful to people who are stuck with their careers or, obviously, businesses.

One thing that I do that I don’t see other coaches doing is include an explicit political framework in my coaching. Not that I tell people whom to vote for, but I do incorporate my conviction that many people are stuck or unhappy not through any fault of their own, but because our hyper-capitalist, hyper-corporate society has decimated our authentic communities, overwhelmed our families, and striven to reduce vibrant, creative, independent-thinking individuals to passive, compliant workers and consumers. For the kind of people I coach – the ambitious dreamers who will fight to retain their dreams and sense of self – the disconnect between who they are and who society is pressuring them to be can lead to incredible confusion, stress and unhappiness.

Then we get to the “micro” level of life as an employee. I believe that many jobs are oppressive, if not abusive – and I’m not talking about the extreme examples involving harassment or discrimination. Even the ordinary insults and injuries of worklife – the regimentation, hierarchies, lack of respect, lack of caring, and bad management, etc. – can damage one’s psyche, particularly over a period of years. More specifically, many of my coaching clients blame themselves for work “failures” that weren’t their fault at all. I’ll be writing more about all this in another post.

Posted in

Leave a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Join My Mailing List For The Latest News And Events

Hillary-Rettig-web-2

Greetings from Hillary!

Welcome! My goal is to help you recognize and overcome any disempowering forces in your work and life so that you can reclaim your joyful productivity and achieve your personal and professional goals more quickly and easily than you ever imagined! Thanks for checking out my site, and I always welcome your comments, suggestions, and questions at hillaryrettig@gmail.com.

Like my page on Facebook!
Follow me on Twitter!

The single best thing you can do to support me and my work is to review one of my books on Amazon or elsewhere. Thank you in advance!