Written by: Nicki Brown, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
There are a lot of things to consider when choosing the right coach for you, but it’s not only what they will tell you that you should consider…it’s also what they don’t tell you.
1. I am not the expert and I will not tell you what to do.
I am not an expert. The only thing I’m an expert on is me, and my life. Even coaches that have years of training and experience, or have seemingly been through the exact same things as you are not the expert. Only the best coaches know that YOU are the expert and the authority on your life. Outsourcing you're decisions and strategies to anyone else, even someone who appears to have “been there, done that” is the best way to accidentally create a misaligned goal, strategy and life. The truth is that nobody is more of an authority on what’s best for you than you. A good coach will not give you the answers but rather give you the questions you need and the safe space to help you draw out and explore your own inner wisdom.
Why does it feel safer for you to outsource your decisions to experts? Sure, it would be easier and maybe even more desirable to hire a coach who can pretend to give you all the answers and tell you what you should do in order to get the outcomes that you want, but all that would do is build a reliance on the coach and that’s not helpful because when the coaching relationship ends, you haven’t been empowered with the tools and the confidence to set goals, navigate challenges, make decisions and trust your intuition. Many of us have been conditioned to look externally for approval and validation on what’s the “right way” to do things, and in doing so put those “experts” up on a pedestal, and unconsciously painting ourselves as helpless and in need of saving. The truth is there is no one way or “right way” to accomplish what you want, there is just finding the best way for you. It’s natural to want to look to an expert or authority to help direct your life and your decisions—I mean, they seem to have it all figured out right? Many of us have spent the majority of our lives looking to parents, authority figures and social constructs to tell us what the right and acceptable way to do things is, and have disregarded our own knowing and our authentic self in an effort to maintain a sense of approval, love, safety and belonging in our relationships. This is a subtle form of self-abandoning that creates disconnection from ourselves, our needs and our desires, and it seeds self-doubt and uncertainty. It also subtly undermines our own personal power by rejecting choice. We fear making a choice may lead us to make the “wrong” choice, and we either fear being wrong and the rejection we perceive we’ll be subjected to as a result, or we fear taking personal responsibility for the sense of failure and crushing disappointment if we chose wrong. But what if the perceived experts only became experts because they dared to get it wrong and to be wrong in the pursuit of their desires? The truth is, choice gives people a sense of personal control and agency in their life, so own that.
2. I cannot fix you, heal you, or get you results. Only you can.
True self-development is exactly that—self-directed. Clients need to direct their own goals, their own healing, and their own strategies and processes for achieving what they want. It’s the only way to create sustainable changes and aligned results in a client’s life—by ensuring that they are the ones leading them, not us.
The best coaches see their clients as smart and capable, not as broken or in fixing because you’re not broken, so there is nothing to fix. Society has convinced you that there’s something to fix so there is always something else to sell you. There may be parts of you that have been wounded, things that you’d like to improve or work on and goals that you’d like to achieve but often, these things can become entangled in our minds with our own insecurities and seeing ourselves as broken or in need of fixing becomes synonymous with seeing ourselves as helpless victims, and/or as wrong, and “not good enough”. Our words matter because they shape our beliefs.
There is a trap that people fall into in the personal development space, and that’s the trap of “never good enough” and “never satisfied" that can sometimes leave people endlessly pursuing “improvements” because unconsciously, we never feel good enough. In my opinion, the true goal of the work is not “fix yourself” and finally feel “good enough” but rather to realize that there is nothing to fix and you’ve always been good enough exactly as you are. Some of the most skilled coaches know that rediscovering your wholeness and your inherent worth is key to creating your outermost desires, because as soon as you realize you don’t NEED something else to make you feel better, your motivation shifts. You are beautifully and perfectly imperfect, and the only thing you need to fix is your relationship with yourself—reconnect with your authentic self and develop your self-love and self-confidence.
The human brain loves to have a problem to fix, so we often create them, and the ego loves to make everything about us, so it can become really easy to get wrapped up in our stories and fabricate problems. Who would we be if we stopped believing that we had all these problems that needed to be fixed? Would we love ourselves better? A big part of my job as a coach is holding up the mirror for people to see themselves more clearly and then when they still can't, giving the mirror a good cleaning and having them take another look. Sometimes it can become hard to see ourselves clearly, simply because we’ve gotten so accustomed to seeing ourselves with a critical lens, or the way that others see us, that we can’t envision anything else.
On that note, I also can’t heal you. I do tell my clients that I can help them heal—but by that, I mean that I can facilitate the self-healing journey. I can help provide you with knowledge, tools and techniques, to begin that healing journey, but I can’t heal you. You listening to me and taking all the tools and applying them isn’t some magical cure, and the support I provide may not be all-encompassing because each persons’ journey is different, and each person’s time to heal is different. On that note, time itself cannot heal you—-if you bury your head in the sand for ten years and don’t deal with something, it doesn’t just go away. Doing the work heals you. Giving yourself the time, support and space to DO the work to heal and being patient with the process, that’s the only thing that works. And that’s also why you’re the only person who can get you results.
3. I’m not perfect and I don’t have it all figured out.
This kind goes back to the expert thing. As coaches we’re often taught that we’re our own best advertisement and that we need to show our clients what’s possible through us. There is great value in this but also a lot of dishonesty because at the end of the day, we’re all just human, and no matter how much we up level our skill, we will always be challenged in new ways.
The real problem is simply the lack of transparency, about what it really takes to get somewhere. Some coaches will not show or share the things that they still walking through or struggling with in their day-to-day, or at least not until we're on the other side of it because we’ve often felt this expectation that we need to do “better” than our clients so they have someone to look up to, or that we need to be perfect so that we’ll attract clients who want to pay us for our services. I know that I myself have fallen into this trap, of feeling like there is this expectation for me to be perfect and to have it all figured out, and then, and only then could I say “ Here is what I went through and here is what I did”, instead of “here is what I’m going through, and here is what I’m doing”. Now let me be clear, sometimes going through something is a process that you’re not ready to share in the moment because it’s too difficult while you’re still navigating it, but that’s different from the coaches I’m talking about who show themselves living these luxurious lives as a billboard for coaching services—-as it to say: “Work with me and your life can be like this too!” And in my opinion, that’s no different than a perfume ad.
I’m not here to paint an illusion of some perfect or grandiose life, like when you do the work that life gets easier and you walk around every day like you’ve won the lottery. Life doesn’t get easier. At each new level there will always be challenges that break you down and fill you with doubt, you just become better equipped to move through the challenges of life with more ease. I think people often enter coaching thinking there will be this before and after moment, like there is some finite point or “end state” where we’re fully healed and unaffected by stresses, challenges and disappointments, etc, but that’s not true. Life is cyclical, it ebbs and flows and there will always be ups and downs. We may become more immune to smaller things because we’re practiced general awareness, mindset, inquiry etc. but we will still have bad days, we will still experience heartbreak, disappointment and any number of unfortunate circumstances and we will still feel all those negative emotions. The goal is not to achieve a “perfect life” or rid ourselves of those experiences but rather learn how to be with them, to recognize our own power, capabilities and resilience in the face of them, to gain the tools and experience to often move through it more quickly and easily and to look for the opportunities.
As coaches it’s our job to embody our work, to live the principles that we teach…but it’s also our job to set level set expectations and to be honest and transparent about the work we can do and what we can really help our clients achieve. While I always see infinite possibilities for my clients and encourage them to see the same, it’s also important to shift expectations and reimagine concepts like success and luxury so that we can really re-envision what “living the good life” really means to us.
4. A Specialist is not Necessarily Better than a Generalist
People often think that a specialist is better than a generalist but the truth is that a specialist is better for specific problems. What most people don’t realize is that their problems are rarely specific in nature, below the symptom or the presentation of the problem is often a more general or common pattern or problem.
Many coaches are told to niche because that’s what sells and scales. That’s how we’re told to market to people. Nobody buys “coaching”, they tell you, so we’re taught to come up with a niche that we want to work with or think we can help and market with that in mind. That’s how you get “Wellness Coaches” and “Mompreneur coaches” and “Relationship coaches” and “Life purpose coaches” and “money mindset” coaches and so on…but here’s the thing, all aspects of our life are deeply related. If we’re having a problem or experiencing a pattern in one area, that same problem is very likely present in another area. The struggle that you have with people pleasing for example, may impact the way we interact with our partner, and it may also impact our finances or our career. The truth is “root cause” coaching is the answer for many people—it’s understanding what’s at the root of the problem and resolving it there. Most people try to solve symptoms so they go to something specific thinking that’s the answer but symptoms are just one of the ways that the real problem is presenting itself. What is causing the symptom? Addressing that is where the real change happened. As I said, most people’s problems are general, at the core. They’re rooted in stories based on fears and insecurities because we all want the same thing at our core—love, security, and belonging.
5. Credentials and Accreditations DO matter
The coaching industry is full of people who call themselves coaches and think that just because they have experience walking through something themselves that they’re qualified to coach people—-without any real experience or expertise in “how” to actually coach and do so effectively and ethically. Sure, for many people who desire to become coaches, they have innate skills and may have been informally coaching their whole lives—like myself. There are also many people who may go through a certification program who may still not be great coaches, or maybe they are good coaches for someone and not for someone else. It’s true, there are good coaches, and not-so-good coaches, whether certified or not. But here is my personal opinion, as an unregulated industry, it’s important I think to create some guidelines around how to coach people well AND how to do so in a way that is ethical and integrity. Also, there are MANY programs out there that certify coaches AND…not all of those programs are certified by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and/or the Association for Coaching (ACC). These organizations are governing bodies that ensure that programs adhere to a certain minimum standard of — coaching certification programs that have been approved by these organizations have had their curriculum vetted and ensure that coaches are not only getting the content training the coaching skills training through peer coaching and supervision of coaching skills.
In summary, there are no shortcuts, quick fixes, or silver bullets. There are no experts, no one is one-size fits all approaches or blueprints, that will give you all the answers, or the fast track. You can’t skip steps, bypass pain, or shorten the time it takes to heal or develop yourself. Be wary of anyone who tries to sell you those things. As I said before, what is right for someone else, is not necessarily right for you, what worked for them will not necessarily work for you. We each have our own beautiful and unique combination of experience, skills, personalities, strengths and challenges. The trick is to see the entire process as a journey — without an end state. We’re constantly evolving as humans. Sometimes you’ll work at it for a long time and see almost no progress. And sometimes you’ll seem to have made quantum leaps overnight. It’s less about specific steps and more about the overall shifts in your being and the small steps and aligned actions you take daily to get there. One thing is for certain, the better you know yourself, the easier and faster it is to align your actions with your desires and actually achieve what you want.
Nicki Brown, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Nicki is a women’s empowerment coach and the owner of Sunflowers In Sunshowers, a company that focuses on helping women flourish through holistic and transformational life coaching. She is passionate about the work she is doing to help women love themselves wholly and live their life more fully. After experiencing a “quarter life crisis”—she struggled with her identity, life direction and overall life satisfaction—this was her awakening. She began a healing journey of self-discovery and uncovering which led to dismantle her pre-conceived beliefs and re-define not only herself but her vision of “the good life”. This journey eventually led her to realize her calling as a life coach and pursue a certification as a life and health coach. Her mission is to help women heal from their past conditioning and misunderstandings so that they can uncover their authentic selves, step into their power and create their vision of “the good life” too. To date, she has had the privilege of helping women all over the world from London, England to Portland Oregon.
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