Coaching as a technology– for empathy, for healing, for moral awareness.

I have high hopes for the coaching industry. Like anything new, easy to get into, and unregulated, it’s going to create a momentum of its own. Add Instagram and influencers and the perception of the industry can overshadow why we as a society desperately need it.

I see coaching as a technology for empathy, healing and for moral awareness. At its core (and it depends on who you learn from), coaching invites you to see how you think and how that affects your experience of the world and how you act within it. In this process, you can become aware and awake to how your values and your own personal way of moving in the world might actually be at odds. And you get the skills to self-correct, should you decide to take that path. You can become aware of how you’re choosing to suffer more rather than feel pain. You can find connection with the outside world in greater ways. For me, this is the promise of coaching. And I believe this is the time we need it.

While our world grapples with the consequences of unregulated capitalism, polarization, patriarchy, disconnection, individualism as well as the movement toward social reform and re-connection, coaching can be there as a grounding force to help you move through this experience and become someone who adds to the healing of our world rather than staying on a path someone else created for you.

The space I’ve identified as most meaningful to me combines business, feminism and creativity. And coaching helps me create the framework to help women break out of patterns handed to them over the years or adopted as survival techniques– not because these women are to blame, but because without the presence of the oppressive systems we’re born into we’d most likely have chosen to think and act differently. It’s in the recognizing of the real pain that we can find a way back to self, with empathy. And from that place, we can become much different business owners or creators than we might have been without that internal work.

Coaching (for me) is a technology to reduce the unnecessary suffering of the individual so that we can knit back into the collective with renewed purpose, energy, and kindness to self and others. We learn how to be courageous when we would have been meek. We learn how to process emotion effectively when we’d have just poured another drink. We learn how to de-center by understanding our center. We learn how to endure the emotion that keeps us connected while also requiring that system treat us with dignity. There will be necessary emotional pain we will choose, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t also societal constructions that are meant to control, oppress, or diminish our humanity. Seeing the difference between these makes way for peace, and an experience of living that is as close to ‘authentic’ as possible. Coaching connects us back to our bodies, while capitalism seeks to separate us from them. Coaching asks us to see what’s real, what’s true– to understand the gravity of our world, and then find ways to use that knowledge and our desires to create innovations for a better world. That’s where creativity comes in. It’s a process that activates your heart as the driving force behind your contributions to the world. And business can be a vehicle that allows you to leverage your time here to bring together what’s good for your heart, your body and your world. Of course, you will still deal with the world and all it’s spiky places– and that is where it’s amazing to have a coach, too. We weren’t meant to do this work alone. But it is inherently internal.

These are complicated things to learn on your own. A coach who is well-trained in thoughtwork and who is invested in their own continuous self-exploration can be an exceptional guide on this path.

This is why I believe coaching is vital to shifting society into a better version of itself, one thought at a time.