Preparing for Life

They’re everywhere, promising transformation, momentum, performance, and vision.  Life coaching as a business has ballooned over the past  twenty years, with tens of thousands of practitioners ranging from psychotherapists and physicians with decades of clinical experience and real wisdom to youngsters whose claims are their only claims to fame.   There are educators, trainers, and credentialers galore, ranging from Maia Berens’ “YOU University” to the Harvard-McLean program, whose life coaches are asked to explain and coach “wellness” into daily lifestyles.  As someone who’s seen patients attended by life coaches who ranged from entrepreneurial consultants to apartment based Svengalis, one question I think merits answers is what goals life coaches should have for the people they’re trying to help.

A Highly  Attenuated and Prejudiced History of Coaching:

1. Advisers have been around since there were people to advise

2. Spiritual leaders have been doing life coaching for several thousand years

3. Sports coaches have been around for centuries, and sports performance metaphors still pervade much of life coaching

4. Many famous life coaches came out of the ferment of the “human potential” movement of the fifties and sixties;  Werner Erhard’s EST, which eventually spawned the Landmark Corporation and Forum, seems to have been an important influence; Thomas Leonard, another influential life coach, worked in business with Erhard

5. Much of the emphasis of American life coaches has been on individual business success

6. Life coaches often try to differentiate themselves from psychotherapists by arguing their work is “emotion free” yet will often burrow deeply into personal lives where emotions are constantly manifest

The Not Quite Wild West

With anybody and still anybody setting themselves up as life coaches, anything human appears to fit itself under life coaching.  Data on the movement is sometimes as hard to obtain as the trading information of Goldman Sachs.  Yet many life coaches recognize the dictum of Calvin Coolidge – “the business of the nation is business” – and have focused on entrepeneurship and management consulting on a personal basis.  As management consulting is itself a giant industry, they appear to have had considerable success with  individuals to achieve specific business goals. Their own business success has flourished.

Yet to achieve real life coaching, further goals should be addressed – there’s more to life than business.

Health and Life Coaching

The Greeks were right – a healthy mind in a healthy body.  If people are going to claim life coaching skills they need to pay attention to the overall health of the people they’re coaching.  No matter how good the advice, the client has to be alive and well to use it.

Several areas need particular address:

1. Food. The standard American diet appears almost designed to wreck the public health of the nation.  Whole foods, especially in great variety, appear to fit the epidemiologic goal of a healthy population.  Many approaches, from Michael Pollan’s “Food Rules” to the Mediterranean diet to East Asian diets, have the potential to maximize overall lifespan.

2. Activity. Not only does lifespan appear to maximize with sixty to ninety minutes of some kind of daily physical activity, brain cells grow and mental performance improves.  Ordinary activities like walking work very well – even growing the hippocampus.

3. Rest. Sleep is necessary for life, but active rest – its physical, mental, social and spiritual elements, appear to maximize healthiness and minimize many of the main killers of mankind.  Taking a walk with the family after dinner is the kind of active rest that can provide multiple life benefits to many.

4. Body clocks. Though business is now 24-7, humans are not machines.  Shift and overwork is a major issue for life coaching, areas where human design need to be carefully understood and explained.

5. Information is physical. Providing the right kind of information to the body can do as much for many people’s “success” as can specific business advice.

Mental Health and Life Coaching

Many life coaches seem to shy away from many mental health issues, and it’s no surprise. Lots of people prefer to see a life coach rather than a psychotherapist, avoiding  the stigma of “mental health treatment.”  However, consigning their work to specific “performance tasks” does not absolve life coaches from recognizing that emotions always color their work.  Some of their clients will use life coaching to avoid rather than tackle serious mental health issues.  Even if life coaches eschew treating mental health themselves (which many of them actually do without naming it) they have to recognize what suffering major depression, anxiety, addiction and psychotic disorders create, and tell the people they see where help is available.  In my experience, they have sometimes been so eager to keep clients that serious personal problems have been neglected.

Real Transformations

Life coaches often do not have a background in the life sciences.  Though aiming for “transformation” they often do not realize that this exactly what the human body does every second of the day – even when people are asleep.

Most of your body is replaced within weeks.  The large majority of tissue in the heart is replaced inside three days.  You get a completely new gut lining in two days.  The brain is constantly rewired and reworked, and every memory is remade whenever retrieved.

You’re quickly new  – whether you know it or not.

Recognizing that humans survive through active, changing regeneration should be a trope for life coaches.  The body is constantly transforming itself.  Much of that process can be individually directed.

So there should be more to life coaching that addressing specific performance goals, including getting more time with one’s spouse.  The original transformative technology is within everyone, and is required for their survival.

It’s already inside you – if you know how to access it.
Rest, sleep, Sarasota Sleep Doctor, well-being, regeneration, longevity, body clocks, insomnia, sleep disorders, the rest doctor, matthew edlund, the power of rest, the body clock, psychology today, huffington post, redbook, longboat key news