Why Do I Coach?

Why do I coach?

In early 2011, I was driving onto the Microsoft Redmond campus to attend a meeting with a client.  I was consulting at the time and had been for five years.   I knew it wasn’t my passion but I liked the flexibility, and my project, and hadn’t yet figured out what I truly wanted to do.  As I drove onto the campus, I saw a woman walking towards the building.  She walked with her head hung, staring at the ground, and her shoulders were slumped forward.  She looked miserable and sad.  This woman is why I coach.

I don’t truly know how this woman felt or her emotional state but she became the inspiration for why I do what I do.  She looked exactly how I had felt when I chose to quit Microsoft in 2006.  I had felt defeated, exhausted and sad.  I had lost any sense of lightness and joy.  I had no concept of who I was and what I loved.  My life revolved around work.    I blamed my job for my lack of a love life.  I was resentful of the entire company and couldn’t see any good from my time there.  My life was an endless cycle of work milestones, business trips, and fantasizing about time away.  I had no purpose.

This woman brought back all my memories and emotions. I knew right then that I didn’t want anyone else to feel the way I had felt – or how I presumed this woman felt.  I had left in 2006 and spent the last five years working on my own personal growth, receiving coaching, and doing healing work.  I knew that life could be so much better.  I had witnessed the transformation in myself.  I wanted to help those that didn’t have the support, guidance, and teaching that I could have so desperately used while employed.

So I coach.  I can’t help but coach.  Even when I am not coaching, I am coaching.  I coach when I manage my consulting projects.  I coach in all my personal and business relationships.  I do it because I sincerely want everyone to be happier and healthier.  I do it because it comes naturally.  I love connecting people with what they want and need.  That’s what I do when I coach – I shine a light on my client’s lives and help them see what they inherently already know to be true.  They come in seeking clarity, direction, and movement in their life and I shine the light in whichever direction they seek.  I meet them where they are at, which means:  I support them, I push them and I encourage them.

I coach for the people that come into my life wondering where all the time went. When they have realized they spent too much time focused on their careers and not enough time creating a fulfilling, robust and joyful life.  Or the people that have been swept up onto a path or role that no longer works for them anymore.  They find their skin crawling from the pain and discomfort of this ill-fitting suit that they’ve insisted on fitting into all these years.  Eventually the pain becomes unbearable.

So I keep coaching for that woman I saw at Microsoft.  I coach for the younger version of myself- the one in my twenties- who didn’t have any support.  I coach to share what I’ve learned and to help people find their authentic self, and then live from that place, and guide them into creating meaning in their lives.