Not that Kind of Coach

For a long time, I was uncomfortable calling myself a coach. Not because I didn’t believe in the work, but because I hated what the word had come to mean in my head.

Online, there is no shortage of people selling courses, certainty, transformation, and themselves. Add in life coaching, manifestation culture, personal branding, and people telling you they know exactly how you should live your life, and I wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of it.

The word coach made me cringe. I hated it.

And yet coaching had changed my life. That was the uncomfortable part.

Therapy had helped me tremendously. It helped me understand where I came from, stabilize after difficult periods, and make sense of experiences I had carried for years. But there came a point when I was no longer in crisis, and I still had no idea how to build a life that actually felt like mine.

I could function. I could work. I could achieve. I could take care of myself. But I was still running patterns I couldn’t see: people-pleasing, performing, masking, taking responsibility for other people’s reactions, and assuming that if someone was disappointed in me, I must have done something wrong.

I had spent years becoming very good at surviving inside systems without realizing how many of those systems I had internalized.

Then I started working with a coach named Neha. She saw things I could not see.

She had a way of asking very simple questions at exactly the right moment. Nothing dramatic or complicated. Just direct enough that I could suddenly hear the assumption underneath what I was saying.

Who told you that? Is that actually true? Why does their opinion get to decide?

I hated questions like that at first. Not because they were wrong, but because they landed.

She could hear an old script speaking before I could recognize it myself. She noticed the people-pleasing underneath my words and challenged beliefs I had carried for so long that I had mistaken them for personality. When those conversations brought up emotion, she helped me slow down enough to notice what was happening instead of immediately trying to fix it.

Where did I feel it in my body? What was I reacting to? Was this actually true, or was an old script running?

She didn’t tell me what to do. She helped me see what I was doing.

There is a difference.

Recently, I had a conversation with a practicing therapist who was skeptical of coaching. He had concerns about scope, qualifications, and the ways coaching can cross lines it should not cross.

I understood those concerns.

There are coaches who overreach. There are people who give advice they are not qualified to give. There are people who position themselves as authorities over other people’s lives.

I don’t like that either.

What surprised me was my own reaction.

Or really, the lack of one.

A few years ago, that conversation probably would have stayed with me for days. I would have replayed it, wondered if he was right, and questioned whether I had any business doing this type of work.

Instead, I realized something had changed in me.

The word coach was no longer triggering the same insecurity in me. I had almost forgotten how much angst it used to cause me.

I had forgotten that the word itself once felt like a problem.

I wasn’t defensive or embarrassed. I was interested. I wanted to explain my perspective, not because I needed him to agree with me, but because I finally knew what my perspective was.

I told him some of my story. I told him that I grew up in a family system where I learned very early to question my own perception. I told him about building a career where I became very good at performing, succeeding, adapting, and tolerating things that did not always fit me.

I told him about alcohol. About therapy. About eventually realizing that being out of crisis was not the same thing as knowing how to build a future.

And I told him why coaching mattered to me. That conversation stayed with me for a different reason than it once would have.

Not because I doubted myself.

Because it reminded me how much weight the word coach can carry. Maybe the word is carrying more weight than the actual idea.

We borrow each other’s strengths. We ask someone who knows more than we do. We let another person see what we cannot see from where we are standing. We ask for guidance. We learn. We get challenged. We get supported.

Sometimes that person is a therapist. Sometimes a mentor, consultant, financial advisor, trainer, or coach. Sometimes it is simply the friend who has been through something before us and knows where the sharp edges are.

The roles are not identical. The boundaries matter. Training matters. Scope matters.

But we are not meant to know how to do everything alone.

That seems obvious when we are talking about practical things. If I do not understand taxes, I call someone who does. If my dog needs training, I find someone who understands dogs better than I do.

We do this all the time.

And yet when the thing we are struggling with is internal, we often decide we should already know the answer.

Why am I stuck? Why do I keep doing this? Why does this situation affect me so much? Why can I understand the pattern intellectually and still repeat it? Why can’t I just figure this out?

Sometimes we can. Sometimes we need time.

And sometimes another person can see the thing that is almost impossible to see from inside our own experience.

That is what I believe a coach can do.

A coach should not tell you what job to take, what your goals should be, who to marry, whether to leave, what your truth is, or what your life is supposed to look like. At least that is not the kind of coaching I believe in.

I think a coach listens, asks questions, notices patterns, and challenges the script when the script starts speaking as if it is fact. A coach can help create enough space for someone to notice what is happening before automatically repeating the same response again.

And ideally, the work becomes less necessary over time.

Because the goal was never for someone else to become the authority on your life.