Confessions of a Coach with a Dumpster Fire Life

I've said it before, and I will say it one thousand times more: if you're waiting until your life is perfect enough for public consumption, get your groove on and become a coach. You are probably focusing too much on yourself and not enough on your potential clients. 

I do not know a single coach who has a perfect life, and I know A LOT of coaches. 

Life is not perfect, and if you're relying on a perfect-looking life to market your coaching practice, your coaching practice and your marketing will be in a constant cycle of start and stutter because life is going to life. Your coaching practice is going to fail with that strategy.

Sometimes life is hard as fuck for everyone. 

April was a really bad month for me—like epic bad. The facts are that the months leading up to April were really bad too. I'm going to spare you all the torrid details, but I will just say that in a cataclysmic string of events, I found myself on or about May first, taking stock of my life and realizing every single area of my life was in crisis - not just strained but almost completely fucked. 

My business and finances had been coasting for too long, and those systems felt really fragile. In April, I made less money than I had since I started my business two decades ago. 

I got sicker than I've maybe ever been in mid-April. Perhaps I had COVID. However, I didn't have the strength or the will to even take the test. More likely than COVID, I probably just bottomed out because of lack of sleep and stress. So, my body finally fired off a big fuck you, leaving me no choice but to go to bed.

All of my primary relationships were strained, some of them beyond repair. Some of my relationships will be in recovery for a long time, and other relationships that once mattered to me will never recover, and I've just made peace with that. I owed too many apologies to count. 

The people I cared for most were in the fallout of my rapidly developing mental health crisis. I was probably dangerously depressed, but I was too anxious to notice that depression. 

And we can debate all day long whether or not I should have been working or whether or not my life was too much of a fuck show for me to think I had anything to offer my clients, but I am not here for that debate BECAUSE my clients do not hire me because they want my life. I am not in the business of selling a fantasy. My life is messy sometimes, and that's not a secret.

When a life coach thinks they have all the answers or all the tools to be unbothered by the experiences that make us human, we lose touch with the humanity that makes us great coaches. 

When a life coach thinks they need to be perfect or at least look perfect to be worthy in the market of a sea of coaches, that coach might be putting way too much value on perfection to be compassionate with other humans. 

"My perfect life" as a marketing strategy is unethical.

Look, if you are hiring a coach because you want a life that looks just like theirs on social media, you might want to reconsider what you want to get out of coaching. Everyone's life is complicated. 

If a coach is selling something that looks shiny and tidy all the time, they are selling a lie. You can't pay for enough sessions to buy that lie - 

but on some level, I think most clients know that. They might try to buy the fantasy by hiring the coach with the "perfect life", but no one is shocked when that doesn't work. 

Someone asked me recently if I would be embarrassed to admit to my clients I'd struggled with anxiety. I laughed and said, I'm pretty sure they already know. It feels like everyone knows. 

And I might be wrong. Maybe potential clients will think I'm a fraud of a life coach for telling the truth about real human experiences, but I don't think so. Humans crave realness.

I believe clients want to work with humans who understand what it feels like to be so anxious you don't notice the depression.

. 

I believe clients want to work with humans who know what it feels like to wake up one day to relationships you don't recognize because you don't recognize yourself.

I believe clients want to work with humans who can embrace the reality that perfect is not all that attractive because our humanity is what makes us beautiful.

I believe clients want to work with humans who do the work to heal when they are broken and humans who walk their talk with honesty, even when it's raw and jagged.

Life will humble us all, and that is a beautiful thing. 

I believe we can be humbled and do great work all at the same time. 

Vulnerability is the truth, and that is a much sexier business model than perfection. 

PS

I am fine. 

I took the meds.

I surrounded myself with loving professional support.

I still sleep a lot in my free time. 

I have a self-care accountability partner who is changing my life. 

I am eating well.

I am committed to rehabing my nervous system. 

I can see the light again and I really do love myself and my life.

Lisa Hayes, The Love Whisperer, is an LOA Relationship Coach. She helps clients leverage Law of Attraction to get the relationships they dream about and build the lives they want. Lisa is the author of the hit books, Score Your Soulmate and How to Escape from Relationship Hell and The Passion Plan. Lisa also trains the worlds best coaches at www.thecoachingguild.com.