While going about your daily routine, have you ever asked yourself “am I truly happy”? We do many things out of habit, out of a sense of “this is the way it’s always been” and often because it’s easier to carry on doing them rather than make a decision and take action to do something differently. If we’re talking about a habit such as buying a certain product, because shopping around for something that will provide better value feels like hard work, then, in the grand scheme of things, that’s probably not going to cause you to feel unfulfilled in your life. BUT, if you start to feel like you are coasting through life without purpose, continuing to do the same things that you’ve done every day even though they don’t really bring you any joy, while you may not feel completely miserable, over time that feeling will start to chip away and you are likely to find yourself with a need for more.
This is just one of the many reasons why people decide to work with a coach. They may not even know what “more” means to them at that stage, but they start to recognise that staying in their comfort zone is preventing them from living a life that they feel aligned with. The unconscious part of them is guiding them to seek a more authentic way of being and their “comfort zone” doesn’t feel quite so comfortable any more.
This is not to say that the minute someone recognises that they would like to live in a different way they start searching for the answer straight away. Some do of course, but in many cases it’s all down to timing. My own personal journey into EFL began when I got my horse Jack and at the time was struggling to connect with him. I thought that Jack needed “fixing”, (which I can now see was a symptom of how disconnected I was) and this lead me to reach out to an animal communicator who asked me if I had heard of Linda Kohanov’s book, The Tao of Equus. I hadn’t, but inspiration to seek it out didn’t come until I fell off Jack and broke my collar bone, which provided me with some free time to read. This happened in the August and was the start of my healing journey. By the February I was in Arizona to join the EASE Programme and start my own journey towards a life that I felt completely connected with.
Often people have an underlying desire to do something with their lives, but life can get in the way and prevent them from taking steps towards that desire (as I’m sure we can all relate to, to a certain extent!)
And this often leads to staying in what has become an uninspiring but “safe” job, feeling disconnected in relationships and absentmindedly going about the same routines that can lead to boredom and feeling depressed or with a sense of “is this it?”. As I have already said, many people don’t even know what is missing from their lives until they find it, I know this was definitely the case for me when I discovered EFL, but that niggling sense of “there must be more” was the reason I was open to something new. For me EFL was the “something more” that enabled me to help people and horses in a mutually beneficial way, a desire I had always had but one that I didn’t initially know how to reach until I started searching.
Of course, there are many different kinds of coaching and part of the initial stages of self development involve finding a coach that resonates the most with you and what you want to get from the work. It won’t be a surprise that people who choose to work with me are usually drawn to horses in some way, even if they have limited experience with them, and are curious about how they can aid healing.
So, in short, quite often what makes people seek out self-development or emotional wellbeing coaching is a desire for something more. But what might make people come back to coaching after completing a workshop, programme or course?
I think this often lies in the understanding that self-development and healing is something that you never really “complete”. It’s ongoing and something that, given the right tools, becomes part of a person’s daily practise. When you start your journey you begin to put the initial pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together which provides some clarity on how you would like your life to be moving forward, but you can only add more pieces to the puzzle if you continue to practise and develop what you have already learnt when you first started.
Sometimes, previous coaching clients (who also do work involving helping people or animals) will come and do a refresher course with me thinking they need a new qualification or better physical tools in order to continue doing the work they do. However, when they allow themselves the time and space to come back to the basic principles, they are often reminded that they have everything they need within them. It’s often about going inward rather than upward.
This doesn’t mean that becoming better qualified isn’t a good thing when it comes to furthering certain careers, and sometimes it absolutely is necessary, but chasing qualifications can also be a symptom of vulnerability and can in fact get in the way of actually getting on and doing the job that you are already qualified to do.
Returning to a coaching environment can give a person who is feeling vulnerable the space to meet those feelings and work through them with the tools that they have already gained when they first started on their self-development journey.
Anyone who has already begun their journey towards healing will understand that it is a form of self-care and that daily practise is an important part of this. But, as I’ve mentioned before, sometimes life gets in the way and even the people who are heavily invested in their healing can slip back into old habits in times of overwhelm or in the monotony of daily life. Upon recognising this, a person might feel drawn back to coaching so they can replenish the skills they need to bring the pieces of their life back together in a way that feels meaningful.
I also find that people who have started healing by attending counselling, or are counsellors themselves, are drawn to this work so they can learn how to embody what they already know about the psychology of emotions.
Before I end this blog I would like to share with you some words from Carol Roush who was my mentor when I started my journey as an EFL instructor:
“We each have a purpose for being on the earth at this time, a purpose that no one else can fulfil. We each have the responsibility to attend to our individual evolution so that we can bring our specific gifts to the whole.”
