In one of those strange twists of fate that crop up when you least expect it (or when I least I expect it), I’ve won a life coaching course in a raffle. The news came perfectly timed: on the same day I officially made it known to my current boss that I was thinking of going freelance. My boss, being lovely but a little less than always forward thinking, looked a little terrified. “Who,” I saw her wonder, “would take care of the routine day to day shores that you currently handle: answering press calls, talking to students, keeping tabs on our place in the media?” It was an unasked question which I could have only answered with a shrug and something along the lines of “I don’t really care, that’s why I’m going freelance.”
I was reeling from my brave, if faltering, steps towards working independence, when I received the message on my mobile phone from “Bob” – a practitioner in “Positive Change Coaching”. I’d entered the raffle at a launch event I’d helped arrange a few weeks back and did so to show a bit of support to the project with no particular desire to win a “Life Coaching Pack”. I didn’t really know what it would mean if I did win anyway. I imagined that people like Madonna might have Life Coaches. Hers, perhaps, dispensing pearls of wisdom on new yoga techniques and how to get your name in the papers by a sickening media stunt dressed up as a random act of philanthropy, for example.
My Life Coach seemed to be a sort of “change facilitator” – life coaches and their ilk use words like “facilitate” you see – who is there to “support me to make the changes I want to make in my life or to support me through changes which are being forced upon me.” Or something like that. If this Life Coach was worth his salt, I thought, I’d be able to outline my plans for the future and with the wave of his magic Life Coach wand I’d be a freelancer with a promising book career ahead of me in no time. Gone would be my propensity for petty distractions, my money worries and my fear of upsetting people, indeed, all the things which get in the way of me actually doing something to make my future plans a reality.
Then Bob suggested we meet in Starbucks (no swanky office in a converted warehouse in the city centre?) and he sent me a questionnaire that looked suspiciously like it had been copied from a self help book… and so I began to have my doubts.
Bob, it turns out, is an amiable enough bloke in his fifties, who was laid off from the Mental Health Service some time ago and decided to take on this path as part of his early retirement plan. He was sitting, looking rather nervous, just inside the door of the coffee shop waiting for me this morning, with a little sign stood up on the table in front of him with his name and the words “Life Coach” on. I wonder if anyone else had come up to him while he was there, thinking perhaps he was running a drop in service, laid on by the good people of Starbucks, for them to access while they waited for their latte?
We settled with our cappuccinos in some cosy seats downstairs and Bob started to outline his qualifications, family history, love of football and favourite bands. He was so keen on talking about himself that I began to wonder if this whole thing had been, in fact, a measly excuse for a date with me. Bob didn’t stop talking for nigh on twenty minutes, a trick, I assumed, to lure me into his confidence, so that I would feel happy to talk about myself. Little did Bob know, I never have any trouble in that department and by the time he’d finished I was chomping at the bit to tell him about my mother’s post-natal depression, my painful teenage years and the range of fantastically beautiful hang ups I now carry around with me as a result of all that. None of this news seemed to impress Bob very much however. Indeed, where as I had been forcible moved from the country town of Malvern to stinky old Berkshire as a fourteen year old (there by ensuring my teenage years were as grim as possible), Bob was able to trump me by revealing that he’d been moved to Australia when he was 13 and had suffered years of persecution as the class “pomme” as a result. He even started to tell me about his anger management issues, but luckily stopped himself after sometime and said (to himself as much as me) “But we’re here for you today not me”, something I was not far off reminding him myself.
The result of my raffle prize then? A free notebook, diary and plastic wallet, 6 more sessions with Bob and a subject for my blog for the next month and a half. By the time we’d got through Bob’s life (and part way through mine) the hour was almost up. Bob threw some grains of advice my way about my plans to go freelance, such as “network with potential clients”, “get some marketing material for yourself”, “do a mind map” and “read a self help book” before telling me that he was going to email me an action plan which I was to fill out. It was to cover the next four weeks and lay out my strategy to change my life before Christmas. “Aren’t you supposed to do that?” I though as he shook my hand and vanished into the crowds in St Anne’s Square.