Nine Nasty Things I Have Learnt as a Coach — Pamela Caravas

blog2+Pamela+UNSSC — *Coaching on negotiation skills at the United Nations System Staff College in Turin, Italy*

Twelve years. Twelve years of loudness and silence, of fighting and ignoring, of losing and achieving.

Twelve seems to be an interesting number when it comes to checking how things have worked out for you over time – either personally or professionally. I decided to write about what I have learnt for two simple reasons: you can learn a lot about the ugly truth that I lay naked on your screen and you can learn a lot about me as a person and a professional through these 9 things. Added value, I will also be analyzing them in future articles, so stay tuned!

Let me clarify that not everything I know or have learnt along the way is of interest to everyone. Yet, for everyone who wants to become a coach or even more importantly, for anyone who feels the need to be coached, this is a great read.

Blog2+Pamela+UNELE+image2 — “Life coaching”? Not my vibe

When I read about “life coaching” in a 2005 article in Harper’s Bazaar Business (for women), I was thrilled with this new gateway.

Should I be introducing myself here? Not really. Almost anything you need to know about me, you may find in the About page and the FAQ section. But I will clarify this: I count my years as a coach only after I had completed a full one-year course of Belgian design (sounds like it could be a chocolate), then a shorter course of Dutch design (could it be an engineering structure?) and then went on to find a mentor-coach in my hometown in Australia, Brisbane, the city I was born in (and, no, my mentor was not a kangaroo).

The Nine things

Want to take a look at the 9 nasty things I learnt along the way?

1. You make enemies the moment you call yourself a life coach.

2. You discover that damn imposter syndrome and you think you have only because they told you about it in your coaching classes (am I really that damn useless?).

3. It is almost an embarrassment to call yourself a life coach today.

4. Compassion and empathy are the worst starting points for a coaching assignment (a series of sessions) with your client.

5. Forgiveness is not key.

6. Happiness is not a choice.

7. You need to be quite smart to be a coach and damn well assessed and evaluated against the right metrics.

8. I am not a leadership or executive coach nor a life coach. I am an intellectual performance enhancement coach, an achievement coach.

9. Coaching is like trying to solve the Rubik’s Cube.

Ready for more?

So, here goes a deeper dive into the first nasty thing I learnt. When I read about “life coaching” in a 2005 article in Harper’s Bazaar Business (for women), I was thrilled with this new gateway. Unknown in Greece, where I lived at the time, life coaching posed a whole new world and I thought I could see great new knowledge in it, as well as a business opportunity (my mind thinks innovation all the time). The same thought, apparently, crossed the minds of hundreds of others in Greece and the world over. Which was not necessarily a bad thing. The really bad thing was the fight for fame and glory – sorry, money. The only coaches who made real money, or had coaching as a full-time job were the ones with some kind of a business or political or celebrity title that the local government and the media would notice or those with access to TV shows.

For some reason, the green monster of jealousy resides well and happily inside far too many coaches. Comparison seems to be the subconscious default MO for the majority of those: I coach more clients, I do it better, I know more, and all with no actual metric to prove their claim – the “hundreds of clients” offering numerous testimonials is the coaching emblem of success and glory. And it remains so even after 12 years, the years I have been around.

Part II coming soon…