adopting two rules for my coaching practice
06 Jan 2022i am listening to an absolutely fire talk on addition and trauma and gabor mate just said something that i want to immediately adopt into my coaching practice.
he said (fairly accurate paraphrase):
i have two rules that i tell to my students:
- help people in compassionate relationships with themselves in the present moment
- get yourself fired as fast as you can, not because you’ve doing a terrible job but because you’ve done such a good job
these sound dead on the money. and the second one resonates with me so hard.
i have been thinking about the pathway of working myself out of a job as soon as possible for a long time. i get a fair amount of pushback from people, including other consultants pretty often about it and i think that makes me clear that i’m onto something.
i love the idea that i have a particular offering to bring to somewhere and once that has been brought and sufficiently integrated, i (1) should bring it others and (2) staying around generally creates codependency (which is unhealthy 100% of the time).
so as a coach, i love the idea of working myself out of a job by giving my coach partners the experiences, skills, and capacities to take care of themselves. as of 2020, there are 7.753 billion people on earth (well, a few of them are in space i guess). that’s a lot of people to work with. and even if i say there are 329 million people in the US and there are 20,000 coaches, that’s 16,450 people per coach to work with. even if i work with 1% of my 16,450 people, that’s 1,645 people. scarcity like isn’t a thing here. and i already have one coaching client overseas.
so yea. helping people be compassionate with themselves in the moment and getting myself fired as quickly as possible. let’s do that.
ps - “as fast as you can” could still mean years and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. it’s wonderful, in fact. because that means there’s lots to do and heal. but if one session is sufficient, letting that be true and not staying on past the point of need is :chef’s kiss:
words / writing / post-processing
329w / ?min / 4min