Written by: William Rees, 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.
My empowering take on personal coaching commonly attracts individuals who are striving to build healthier relationships with themselves, who are yearning to understand and honor their true values, and who are looking to ignite more creativity and confidence in their personal and professional lives.
Key issues that individuals from all walks of life look to confront at different points in their lives – issues that impact members of the LGBTQ+ community in particularly complicated ways.
Underneath the unique experiences and issues that draw individuals of all backgrounds to coaching, nearly every client I team up with is essentially looking to arrive at the same beautiful goal.
“I want to be me…but I want to belong.”
And if we listen closely to that universal hope we can detect a fear lurking within it.
“if I were to truly be me…I’m afraid that I couldn’t belong.”
That whispered fear that we all have occasionally drifting through our heads tends to pound harder and louder for members of the Queer community.
Being Vs. Belonging
Right off the bat, Being and Belonging are set-up as mutually exclusive options for Queer youth as they begin to discover and define themselves. A lifetime spent sacrificing authentically Being for the safety of Belonging makes a most unfortunate impact on one’s ability to understand and honor themselves cleanly and clearly.
But the tremendous honor of what I get to do through my accredited coaching practice, Keylight, is to activate solutions and super-strengths from within my clients in order to craft stories with happy and fully authentic endings.
Here’s what I’ve learned about the relationship between Being and Belonging though my partnerships with Queer clients, and how these inspiring insights have impacted my entire coaching approach.
Trapped inside glass jars
Individuals new to coaching work are often surprised to learn that certified, skilled coaches don’t offer advice or pre-packaged solutions on how to solve life’s most common or complex challenges.
Oftentimes the reaction to that discovery is something like, “Well, if I knew what to do I wouldn’t have to seek out a coach. How am I gonna figure out what to do in my life or career or marriage through coaching if a coach like you won’t ever tell me what the smart or healthy thing to do would be?”
Great question! And here’s the answer I often provide potential new clients, gay or straight – through a metaphor that illustrates the great honor it is to invite coaching into someone’s life.
One of my incredible coaching mentors uses this following symbolic story of Glass Jars:
How, when we’re born, we aren’t truly able to look out at the world or in the mirror with complete clarity. Because upside-down Glass Jars are placed over us from the day we’re born. Jars formed and colored by the views and values of our parents, our siblings, the people who first rear us.
These (often well-meaning) Glass Jars instantly inform us as to who we could be in the world, and who we definitely can’t be. What we can talk or laugh or cry about, and what we should not.
Which toys a boy can play with, and what hair-lengths girls aren’t supposed to sport.
As we grow up, additional, larger Glass Jars get lowered on top of the original Jars. Glass Jars shaped by who our grade school friends are and what they think is or isn’t hip and happening. While we continue to age and evolve and search for our success, additional layers of Jars build around us, blurred by what our college years, early careers, and social media feeds allow us to see as possible or not, as important or unimportant.
So some clients might scope out coaching, hoping to be told what to do and how to live by their coach, but they won’t ever discover the free and fulfilled life they are seeking from an
advice-spewing coach who, essentially, is acting as nothing more than another world-warping Glass Jar.
Within the warped glass
One of my clients shared with me this story from his childhood: How his younger brother was a member of a pee-wee football league and how the entire clan regularly crammed into their suburban station wagon to revel in and reward the relatively unremarkable amateur athleticism of his sporty sibling in action.
But my client’s passion for piano playing was treated within the family quite differently. He was told to only practice his songs if no one else was in the house. And when his recitals rolled around, not once did the family ever cram into their station wagon to go listen to his tuneful talents. He played only for an audience of strangers, uncelebrated and unsupported.
Growing up gay is to look out at the enitre world: at siblings and gatherings, at gifts and passions, at one’s very self, through finger-print-smudged layers of Jars constructed of incrediblly thick and unflattering Glass.
Year after year, these seemingly shatter-proof Jars further box us in, continually drawing our eyes toward the endless ways we can not truly or queerly Be ourselves if we dare to also Belong.
Lifting the glass jars
My greatest power as a certified coach, a power which I consider to be quite sacred and sublime, is to help individuals lift any and every Glass Jar up and off of their eyes so they can observe and honor their world and their true passions with greater purity and clarity.
That clarity of vision is something we all deserve, and quickly provides us the empowered posture needed to tackle that big old Being or Belonging question.
The rainbow-colored jar
Craving the acceptance and camraderie that often is so illusive in our formative years as Queer youth, a good number of Queer individuals eventually find themsleves penned in by yet another Glass Jar - in the shape and form of Queer Culture/Community itself.
A potentially rote set of hobbies, haunts, hairstyles, and hashtags that draw many Queer individuals together joyfully, but can leave some Queer community members feeling out of place, asking themsevles yet again:
How can I be the queer me…but belong and actually be happy?
Not recognizing themselves in the RuPaul-shaped patterns or bar scene pleasures of other Queer individuals around them they struggle with the tempation to betray themselves, once again, for the benefits of Queer Belonging.
Being & belonging: A love story
Nothing my clients address, experience, or achieve will produce any sort of truly meaningful impact inside them if they aren't endeavors aligned with their inherent values and visions.
Desires dictated by the shapes of Glass Jars and goals governed by the weight of Glass Jars simply will not serve any of us or supply us with true success.
Queer or straight, young or old, we’ve all been pained by the admission prices required to Belong. Because the price was our authentic selves. Our ideas, our passions, our hopes, our truths.
What Keylight clients and I practice through the coaching process is looking inward (rather than outward) in a time and space completely free from the blurring distortion of even a single Glass Jar.
By sharpening and honoring their inner vision in that unburdened way - my clients begin seeing, with clarity and confidence, the beauty of who they are, and exactly how they want to Be in their lives to express and advance that beauty. They’re encouraged to finally define, completely on their own terms, what it means to be valuable, to be vital, to be Queer. Prior definitions shaped by decades of Glass Jars are untangled and then erased.
The liberation and empowerment that comes to a client by reconnecting to who they truly are swiftly begins shattering the years and fears of worried whispers which told them they could never Be true if they hoped to ever truly Belong.
The unique insights and incredible achievements unlocked by my Queer clients have illustrated to me that authenticity is never a barrier to Belonging. Authenticity is, in fact, the one and only bridge to Belonging.
And that by liberating individuals to summon and celebrate their own insights and answers to life’s most important and epic questions we can, in a matter of weeks, shatter decades of stifling and suffocating Glass Jars.
Excited to view your gifts and goals in a clear, confident light and unlock the authentic you?
Book a Free Discovery Call with Queer Life + Wellbeing Coach William Rees here to learn more about his energizing approach to unlocking happier + healthier lives.
William Rees, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
William Rees is a leading Career and Wellbeing Coach and the founder of Keylight, the top-tier coaching practice renowned for empowering individuals and duos to cast their endeavors in vibrant and visionary light. Drawing upon his two decades as an award-winning filmmaker, Rees instills a cinematic sense of adventure and wonder into the personal and professional pursuits of his diverse roster of clients. Honoring the idea that The Greatest Art Form is Life Itself, Keylight’s poetic and powerful approach to self-development quickly unlocks clarity and creativity for uniquely inspired living.
