You don’t need a coach
You just don’t know you don’t need it.
How could you? When all you read online is ’10 reasons why you need a coach’. It’s not your fault.
We live strange times. We have emoticons to use instead of actual words describing feelings, we are force-fed the power of positivity even when we are not rainbows and butterflies people, we have coaches to tell us how to feel good or how to achieve that. The way we feel is polished, shaped into something else, something positive. And boy is that wrong.
How did we get here?
When did we get stripped by all our -authentic- feelings and had them replaced with some fake mumbo-jumbo, something some guru of self-love has decreed as better?
Well it’s easy.
The 20th and 21st centuries came with a lot of facilitators. From cars to fastplanes, from the dial-up internet to optic fibre, we like things fast, we like them now. Confort has never been this great, we have never lived better times than now. We don’t have to get up and cook, we can just pickup the phone and order in. Outdoors physical activity has been replaced with Peloton sessions and Zoom yoga. If anything, the pandemic has showed us how we can have everything indoors, 24/7. No need to make a physical effort.
Why not have it the same for our brains?
Why bother finding motivation? Why struggle solve any emotional challenge by ourselves? Why not use a psychologist, coach, spiritual healer? Why do all this gymnastics of the mind when there can be someone else helping us carrying the weight?
I guess there is an argument or fairness that can be made here.
If we do get help everywhere else in our lives, why draw a line at our psychological wellness? We have invested a lot of resources — research, conferences, articles, books, TV shows — into making things fast, we can and are doing the same to alleviate what feels like an emotional burden.
There is a catch, though.
We made things faster and faster so we’d save time. Time we’d invest into thinking, developing even greater ideas, conquer new frontiers. That was the plan.
Are we sticking to it? Let’s see.
What are we doing with the newly found time? Netflix — absorbing fake stories about fake people, social media — getting intoxicated with stories of real people but taken out of context. Basically we compare ourselves to others. A lot. The outcome is depression, anxiety, FOMOs.
So no, we are not sticking to our plan.
But instead of taking responsibility for this, for our mistake, we cry like babies and let someone else fix the booboo. Because we can, because it’s comfortable, because we are (mostly) lazy. This is why there is a wealth of coaches, psychologists, spiritual healers. Because it’s easier to express a need for them than to do the actual work to heal ourselves. Because we got used to asking and we shall receive. Because there has never been a better time to be alive.
And they are a self-fulfilling prophecy. Kind of like a drug.
Once we use it, we can’t possibly imagine going back to the times when we lived without it. Things are so much easier when someone else tells us what to do, how to feel.
The things is …
Humans are incredibly resilient being. How else? We’ve been here for such a long time and I’d say, with the exception of pollution, we are doing a pretty good job at existing. So I think, most of us are very much equipped for dealing with any type of anxiety, depression, loss, motivation, heartbreak, etc. Pretty much anything you can throw at us, I’d say we can take it. If we want it.
Maybe that’s the thing. Wanting it. Wait, I think I proved the point for them. Let me ask my therapist what this misplaced anger means.
