My friend Mitch tells a story about playing Bottle Bash with a friend.
If you don’t know the game, you throw a frisbee at a bottle perched on top of a pole.
Mitch kept missing.
His friend watched him for a while, then suggested one tiny adjustment to where he was placing his foot.
Mitch tried it.
He hit the target.
Then he hit it again.
And again.
Ten times in a row.
Nothing about his strength had changed.
He hadn’t spent six months practicing.
Someone standing outside of him, with some relevant skills, could simply see something he couldn’t.
That’s the power of coaching.
Which brings me to a profession with a slightly ridiculous name:
Life coaching.
What does it mean to coach someone at LIFE?
Who the heck is qualified to do that?
At its best, a life coach helps you see what you can’t see from inside your own life, access your own wisdom, learn skills you may never have been taught, and practice those skills until they become capacities you can actually use.
What does a life coach actually do?
For a long time, I felt a little embarrassed to call myself a life coach.
There’s no license. No standardized training. No governing body that gets to decide whether you know what you’re talking about before you put the words on your website.
And there are certainly plenty of people giving advice about how to live whose lives I have no interest in emulating.
But lately, I’ve been thinking the words are more accurate than I used to give them credit for.
Because I believe there are skills involved in creating a truly meaningful, fulfilling life. And most of us were never taught them.
I sure wasn’t.
The life skills nobody taught us
I went to excellent schools.
I learned algebra and biology and how to write a five-paragraph essay.
I learned how to get good grades, get into a good college, get a good job, work hard, meet deadlines, and generally be a competent and productive member of society.
But nobody taught me how to know what I actually wanted.
How to say no when someone I loved wanted me to say yes.
How to disappoint people without deciding I’d done something wrong.
How to feel anger without either swallowing it or spraying it all over someone else.
How to tell the difference between fear and intuition.
How to have a hard conversation before resentment built up.
How to make a big decision when there was no way to know for sure how it would turn out.
How to notice when I was living for approval instead of aliveness.
How to let myself have something really, really good.
These are skills.
And they’ve turned out to matter as much to the quality of my life as anything I learned in school.
Probably more.
Yet, as a culture, we mostly expect people to figure them out on their own—if ever.
If you’re lucky, you learn some of them in your family.
If you’re lucky, you have wise friends or elders or spiritual teachers.
You might pick some up in therapy. Or books. Or workshops.
Or you learn them the way I learned a lot of mine: by making the same painful mistake enough times that eventually you become VERY interested in another way.
This is the cultural gap I think life coaching, at its best, helps fill.
A life coach shouldn’t be the expert on your life
Now, I don’t think a life coach should be an expert on YOUR life.
I don’t know whether you should leave your marriage.
I don’t know whether you should quit your job.
I don’t know whether you should have a baby or move to Portugal or start the business or call your mother.
You’re the only one who can know what’s right for you.
So yes, a lot of my job is helping you get underneath the fear, obligation, conditioning, and very persuasive arguments in your head so you can hear your own wisdom.
But that’s not all I do.
Because sometimes you don’t need another good question.
Sometimes there’s something you simply haven’t learned yet.
There are many different approaches to life coaching. Some coaches mostly use questions and reflection to help clients discover their own answers. Others bring specific frameworks, teaching, practices, or expertise.
My own approach includes both. I believe you are the authority on what you want your life to be. I also believe there are learnable skills—around emotional regulation, relationships, communication, decision-making, pleasure, integrity, and self-awareness—that can make you much more capable of creating it.
There are skills for regulating fear.
Skills for feeling feelings without being run by them.
Skills for having constructive conflict.
Skills for making clean requests.
Skills for recognizing a Whole Body Yes and a Whole Body No.
Skills for taking full responsibility without taking ALL the responsibility.
Skills for telling the truth.
Skills for opening to pleasure.
Skills for finding your way back to yourself when you’ve drifted off course.
And knowing ABOUT these things isn’t the same as being able to do them.
That’s where the word COACH starts to feel truly accurate.
Life coaching is about practice, not just insight
A good tennis coach wouldn’t watch you hit a terrible backhand and ask:
“What does your inner wisdom tell you about that?”
Hopefully, they’d also teach you something.
They’d notice what you can’t see.
They’d show you another way.
Then they’d have you try it.
Again.
Again.
Again.
Until your body knows how to do something it couldn’t do before.
That’s a lot of what I do with my clients.
We talk about your actual life.
We find the places where you’re stuck.
Sometimes I ask the question that helps you hear something you already knew.
Sometimes I teach you something I desperately wish someone had taught me 20 years ago.
Then we practice.
You try it with your partner.
You try it with your clients or your boss.
You try it when someone is disappointed in you.
You try it when you’re scared.
You try it when something wonderful happens and every old part of you wants to contract around it.
And slowly, you get better.
Better at life?
Well…
Not Life, like there’s some universal scoreboard and we know how to win.
Better at YOUR life.
Better at creating the particular version of it that feels deeply yours.
More honest.
More connected.
More pleasurable.
More courageous.
More meaningful.
More…alive.
And sometimes, just like Mitch playing Bottle Bash, the thing that changes everything is surprisingly small.
A distinction you didn’t know existed.
A skill nobody taught you.
A pattern you can’t see from inside yourself.
A tiny adjustment in where you’re putting your metaphorical foot.
Then you practice.
And one day you realize:
Something that used to be incredibly hard for you isn’t that hard anymore.
You got better at it.
Maybe you really can get better at life.
I sure feel like I have. And I want to share that with you.
What does a life coach actually help with?
Life coaching can look very different depending on the coach. In my practice, I work with people who are already thoughtful, capable, and self-aware—but who know some part of their life could feel much better than it does.
That might mean figuring out what you actually want next. Making a difficult decision. Changing patterns in your relationships. Learning to trust yourself. Getting better at boundaries and telling the truth. Finding more meaning in your work. Feeling more pleasure and aliveness in your everyday life.
Sometimes the work is about seeing something you can’t see from inside your own patterns.
Sometimes it’s learning a skill you were never taught.
And sometimes you already know exactly what to do, but need support actually doing it.
The goal isn’t for me to become the authority on your life.
It’s for you to become increasingly skillful at creating a life that feels like yours.
Life coach vs. therapist: What’s the difference?
There can be overlap between coaching and therapy, but they aren’t the same thing.
Therapists are licensed mental health professionals who can diagnose and treat mental health conditions. Life coaching isn’t mental health treatment, and a life coach shouldn’t try to replace appropriate therapy or medical care.
Coaching is generally oriented toward where you are now, where you want to go, and developing the awareness, skills, and practices that help you get there.
For me, that means we don’t just talk about your life. We use your actual life as the practice field.
You learn something. You try it. You see what happens. We adjust.
Just like any other kind of coaching.
How do you know if life coaching could help you?
You don’t need to be in crisis to work with a life coach.
In fact, coaching can be particularly powerful when your life is basically working—but you have the persistent sense that there’s more available to you.
You might know that you’re ready for something to change but not know what. You might keep running into the same problem despite understanding it intellectually. Or you might simply want to become better at the skills that make a fulfilling life possible.
You don’t have to figure all of that out before you ask for support.
If there are parts of life you’re tired of figuring out the hard way, that’s exactly what coaching is for. I offer 1:1 life coaching for people who want to create lives that feel more honest, meaningful, pleasurable, and alive.
