Passive Aggressive Life Coach!

On my education and journey to become a Life Coach and Therapist I have learned a lot and will continue to do so. I have been put in contact with a plentiful supply of other Life Coaches and people who work in the industry.  Life Coaches are such a helpful bunch, so eager to chat and point you in the direction of useful texts and examples.   Tools like facebook and LinkedIn are marvelous.  Someone who I had nattered to over a few years on various of other networking sites had recently trained to become a life coach and was initially very enthusiastic.  We linked up on facebook and got chatting about this and that.  I said what area I wanted to work in as a specialty and he was again very bubbly and enthusiastic, then we got onto fee structures and I asked what he charged…. he said he was still finding his feet and was offering Life Coaching to friends for free.  Fair enough I thought, but then asked did he not feel as though someone should be a life coach for monetary gain.  He didn’t like that I challenged that, saying Doctors, Dentists, Nurses, Teachers and the like get paid so why shouldn’t a Life Coach.  He huffed it off.

This chap said he was going to merge Life Coaching with Astology and Energy readings?  This is when I really started to question his leanings.  Life Coaching is acting as a medium so a client can find his or her own answers and set realistic achievements to ultimately get to their goals, not do their hororscope and see what colour energy they have around them. I agreed to disagree.

A few weeks passed and he was setting up his website, and asked for feedback, so I had a flick through, and commented on the spelling errors, grammatical mistakes and the colours made the text dance in front of your eyes.  He didn’t speak to me for a week, posting comments on facebook that people were against him.

His posts on facebook became more and more erratic, and wallowing in a self made pity party, ‘my mother never loved me’, ‘I’ve not been in a relationship for years’ and ‘I don’t conform to a gay group’ then ‘I’m a muscle cub and pumping iron to get bigger at the gym’.  He deleted friends on facebook if they didn’t reply to his wall posts, claiming ‘they don’t care, so I won’t’ I tried to point out that people don’t live their life on line, but again he wouldn’t listen.

Life Coaching is about listening skills and questioning, these are the key requirements, however when talking to him it was like he was just looking for a gap in the conversation to talk at you.  Life Coaching is about acknowledging others and the situation, he seems to skirt over this.

The most recent events have been even more strange, and I distanced myself.  This coach has decided to film some motivational videos and post them on his YouTube channel.  These are a range of badly filmed monotone monologues filmed on a web cam with a kitchen with pots and pans in the sink in the background, okay the aesthetic isn’t the main thing, the content of what he says should be addressed, this is unscripted and waffling with no particular point, or if there was I didn’t get it.  In amongst these ‘motovational’ videos to address individuals self improvement is a long 9 minute rant about how shit his life is, how people don’t understand him and how bad he has been treated.  This is not the actions of a sensible and level person who is launching a career to help others improve their lives.

Yes he may have had a hard life, but Life Coaching is moving forward changing behaviours, not harping on about how bad your childhood was or life changing event that happened in the past, or even seeing something nasty in the woodshed, yes, acknowledge it, take what ever you learned from it that you can benefit from and move forward.

To conclude this pity party became too much, he wasn’t helping himself, he asked for advice but didn’t want to take it, in my humble opinion he’s got to get himself ready to change, as at the moment he’s just repeating a cycle.  I have since removed him from any social and business networking sites, I do hope that he turns a corner and finds a balance in the future.

But be warned, if you are looking for a Life Coach that will just talk at you, then do your energy colours and an astrological reading run for the hills!