How coaching helped me

Today, we generally have an idea of how mentoring and psychotherapy can help people. But coaching is ambiguous. What is coaching, exactly? And how can it help me?

Unfortunately, the coaching profession isn’t much help. The International Coaching Federation, the largest professional coaching association, provides this definition:

ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.

OK. The definition was created by a committee. While helpful, it’s abstract, and it raises more questions than it answers. So in this post, I want to make coaching and its benefits more concrete by talking about coaching’s impact on me.

My encounter with coaching was an important part of my coaching journey. It began in late 2009, when I had hit a low point in my career at the Roman Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh. As I mentioned in my first post, working in the Catholic Church at the height of the sexual abuse scandal was profoundly painful. But that was only one part of the hurt I was experiencing. It felt like the entire institution was crashing around me. 

I felt burnt out and deeply hurt.

I felt ashamed to tell people where I worked. 

I felt I couldn’t trust some of the people I was working with.

The economy still hadn’t recovered from the Great Recession.

And I had no idea how to get out. 

I faced two large, long-standing barriers. The first was communicating what I could offer. As I would later my students, I had a bachelor’s degree in classics, a doctorate in rhetoric, and no idea how to explain either to anyone. This problem isn’t uncommon, especially for people in the humanities. I knew the value of my education, but I didn’t think people believed me when I told them what that value was. 

And truth be told, I didn’t believe it myself.

The second barrier was much bigger because I had spent so much of my life building it. Growing up a smart, bookish kid in a rural area where the closest gallon of milk was twenty-five minutes away and the Patrick Swayze movie Red Dawn was considered a documentary, I always felt out of place. That inability to connect often meant I didn’t have the social support and network I needed to make big changes. I was isolated, and I didn’t know what to do.

As 2009 ended, my frustration was turning into depression. I urgently needed help to get unstuck, but I didn’t know where to turn. I didn’t have any mentors to help me, and I had enough experience with psychotherapy to know my problem didn’t require it. I needed support to build a plan and move forward with it. And I need the confidence to keep going.

At the time, my only exposure to coaching was a segment on The Daily Show poking fun at it. But on a whim, I Googled coaches around me, and I clicked the first link. I found a coach who seemed similar to me. He was bright and highly educated and seemed like he would “get” me. He wouldn’t be trying to solve my problems or to “fix” me. Instead, he would offer support, insight, encouragement, and accountability as I figured it out for myself.

After a month or so of visiting his website, I finally decided to contact him. When we spoke, I encountered a warmth and encouragement I had rarely experienced, even in psychotherapy. We agreed on an initial contract of nine sessions. Although he operated on a sliding scale, and his rates were reasonable, I still hesitated. Was coaching really worth it?

After thinking a bit, I realized I would have been willing to pay three times as much for an MBA course in accounting. Why wouldn’t I pay a fraction of that to learn more about myself? 

We started by designing exercises to help me learn more about what I wanted and where my strengths and gaps were. I interviewed people who knew me well—at the time, this was a short list—to see how they saw me. I told stories about times where I felt proudest and most fulfilled. I reflected on my interests and values. And I started to get a sense of what I really wanted.

Based on that knowledge, we designed two plans of action, both focused on connecting with others. I made goals to contact three people per week to learn about what they did. And I committed to meeting with at least one group that shared my interests per week. 

Both of these commitments required getting over my discomfort, shyness, and inertia. But I quickly learned there were loads of people with interesting stories to share. A lifelong, self-described introvert, I started to find energy and enjoyment being with others.

Of course, not all of my experiments worked. Once, I came back from an informational interview with someone working at what I considered my dream job. It turned out that it wasn’t—far from it, in fact—and even if it was, they weren’t hiring. And even if they were hiring, they would never hire someone with my background. I was devastated. 

After I told him what happened, my coach asked a simple question: “Craig, what did you expect to happen?” 

I immediately realized far ahead of my skis I was. I was on a coffee date looking for a marriage proposal. And that question helped me reframe what I was doing. From then on, I kept my expectations light, and “failed” experiments didn’t weigh me down as they had before.

Let’s be clear: There’s nothing magical about what my coach did. And it took several years of psychotherapy to begin to work through how I had adapted to growing up where I did. But my coach helped me by creating safety, listening deeply, offering feedback, and encouraging me. 

That’s all I needed. And that’s all many of us need.

A coaching client once told me during our concluding session that our time together was just a chapter in his life story. There were many chapters before, and there would be many chapters after. We didn’t finish telling his story or come to a cinematic conclusion. But we didn’t need to. He was ready.

The same was true for me. After my coach and I stopped after six months, I didn’t have a job offer, but I had found a rhythm and a set of habits to keep me going. About two months later, at a German-speaking interest group I had joined, I met the woman who would become my wife. And three weeks after that, I connected with the managing partner of a consulting firm that had rejected my resume four years before. They hired me two months later.

This story is a big part of why I do what I do. If what I wrote resonated with you, and you would like to talk more, feel free to reach out.