Hire a Self-Centered Coach

At some point, doing everything ourselves stops being resourceful.

It starts getting expensive.

Not always in money.

In years.

I saw a career coach wrestling publicly with whether it was ethical to ask women dealing with serious financial stress to spend thousands of dollars on coaching.

She believed in her work.

She knew she could teach them skills.

But she couldn't guarantee the promotion, raise, or job offer they wanted.

So she wondered whether asking them to invest was responsible.

I kept getting stuck on the premise.

Because I pay for coaching.

I have paid for consultants.

Courses.

Experts.

People who knew things I didn't know yet and people who could see things I couldn't see from where I was standing.

Not one of them could guarantee what would happen afterward.

That's not what I was buying.

I was buying another set of eyeballs.

There is a DIY tax.

And eventually, we stop being willing to pay it.

When we're younger, trying something for three years before realizing it isn't working can feel almost quaint.

 

At 45 or 55 or 65, three years hits differently.

Time has become louder.

Not because we're running out of it tomorrow.

Because we finally understand that it isn't renewable.

Money comes back.

Tuesday does not.

And doing it ourselves isn't automatically the more responsible choice simply because it's cheaper.

Sometimes DIY means spending another year inside the exact same assumptions that created the problem.

We keep asking ourselves questions we've already answered.

Keep considering possibilities we've already considered.

Keep negotiating with beliefs we don't realize are beliefs.

We aren't stupid.

We're standing inside the system we're trying to examine.

Of course some of it is invisible from there.

This is one of the reasons I believe so deeply in coaching.

Not because I possess the Secret Scroll of Correct Life Decisions.

Lord baby sloth on a tricycle, no.

I believe in it because fresh eyes change what becomes available to us.

Someone else can hear the rule hiding inside an explanation.

Notice the assumption masquerading as evidence.

Ask the question we would never think to ask because we've already decided what the answer is.

And for the women I work with, there is another complication.

Most of us are already extremely good at doing hard things.

That is rarely the missing skill.

We can make the spreadsheet.

Read the book.

Download the workbook.

Listen to the podcast at 1.7x while unloading the dishwasher.

We have spent decades learning how to push ourselves.

Which is exactly why I have zero interest in building a coaching program that gives women another fucking job.

I don't want eight weeks of transformation homework.

I don't want women proving how committed they are by becoming exhausted more efficiently.

I don't want growth to require becoming temporarily obsessed with self-improvement.

I built my eight-week coaching Quest around a completely different premise:

For eight weeks, I want to make my client the most interesting thing in her own life again.

Not her employees.

Not her partner.

Not her children.

Not her aging parents.

Not the seventeen people who need something from her before lunch.

Her.

We get curious about what lights her up.

What drains her.

What she wants more of.

What she keeps tolerating.

What she's outgrown but hasn't given herself permission to leave behind.

What she misses.

What she wants now that she might never have wanted ten years ago.

And what happens when we stop treating every one of those discoveries as selfish.

Because out of all the women I've ever coached, I have never met one I would describe as selfish.

Not one.

So at this point, I'm pretty comfortable suggesting we run toward selfish.

Full speed.

Let's see how close we can get.

Because I promise, we're not going to accidentally overshoot and wake up one morning no longer giving a shit about anyone but ourselves.

But we could certainly get a heckuvalot closer to giving a shit about ourselves, too.

Run toward selfish.

Become self-centered.

I call myself a Dopamine Coach because I use curiosity, novelty, celebration, and play to make change easier for our brains to engage with.

But maybe that's only half the job description.

Maybe I'm actually teaching women how to become self-centered.

Not self-absorbed.

Self-centered.

To put ourselves back at the center of our own lives.

That's why there are daily prompts that take minutes instead of assignments that eat an evening.

It's why our coaching calls are short and frequent instead of another hour-long obligation jammed onto an already feral calendar.

It's why there is surprise mail.

Raffle tickets.

Celebrations.

Novelty.

Play.

Intentional ridiculousness.

None of that is decoration around the coaching.

It IS the coaching.

We use play and curiosity as shortcuts to help a woman remember that her life gets to be about more than how useful she is to everyone else.

Because somewhere along the way, a lot of us learned that growth was supposed to be terribly fucking serious.

That meaningful change required discipline.

Sacrifice.

Homework.

But what if change could feel interesting?

What if curiosity worked better than criticism?

What if ten intentional minutes could matter?

What if we collected evidence instead of constantly evaluating ourselves?

What if the woman who has spent decades taking care of everyone else didn't need one more person telling her what she should be doing?

What if she needed someone beside her asking better questions?

That's the work I love.

I watch women realize that the things they've been treating as facts are sometimes just very well-rehearsed stories.

That capability is not the same thing as obligation.

That wanting something does not require defending it in court.

That giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt is not intellectual dishonesty.

That taking up space does not require a permit.

And perhaps my favorite:

That transformation does not have to feel like work in order to count.

I cannot guarantee what any woman will do with those eight weeks.

I cannot guarantee she'll change careers.

Leave the relationship.

Stay in the relationship.

Start the company.

Take the trip.

Ask for the money.

Write the book.

Or decide she likes her life exactly as it is and simply wants to inhabit it more fully.

That part belongs to her.

Good.

I don't want it.

Because coaching, at least the way I practice it, isn't me becoming the new authority on somebody else's life.

It's helping her hear herself without forty years of static.

There is always a cost to getting help.

There is also a cost to staying alone with the same view.

We pay either way.

What tender will you use?