Looking at my past three years of coaching clients, I noticed that around 48% of them come to me for career problems, while 52% come to me for life-related areas. From that data point, it seems natural to call myself a life and career coach.
So, why haven’t I?
For all these years, I have been hiding behind the shame of calling myself a life coach. Even though I am a professionally trained trainer and ICF-certified coach, I still carry this shame. Despite the data showing that half of my clients seek help with their life problems, I wasn’t courageous enough to look at it. I dodged it by calling myself other fancier names.
Those names aren’t wrong, but my intention was to hide behind this half-translucent, half-gray layer of energy called shame.
When I look at this layer of shame, it reminds me of a meditation teacher I had many years ago. My teacher was joking about a young lady who was going through coaching school to become a life coach. They were teasing her and laughing, saying, “Oh, she’s only twenty-something. You haven’t even had a life yet. How can you call yourself a life coach?”
I hate to admit it, but I was agreeing with her. Twenty-something years was not long enough. How can they call themselves a life coach?
Ouch.
I didn’t know then that life coaches do not teach people. We support people to see what is really blocking them from moving forward, including this shame.
That was when the experience of this shame first came to me. Over the years, through different media and society, I picked up more signals of how people view life coaches, and it’s not very positive. The layer grew thicker and thicker. Something was tugging at my heart while I simultaneously wanted to run away and have nothing to do with it.
Still, the data shows that half of my clients come to me with areas of their lives they would like to improve. Even for the clients who initially come to me for career coaching, after a few months, we inevitably start talking more about what’s going on in their personal lives.
What’s so shameful about life coaching? It’s just a word; it is who I am. It also carries the energy of how people view this type of career. Out of habit, I was spending so much focus and attention on caring about how other people think, or how that specific group of people thinks, that I forgot to see who I am.
It’s just a word, a label to describe this being of existence.
A touching point is that it reflects that “I have not lived long enough life to call myself a life coach.”
I start to notice other areas of shame I carry with this “not enough”:
I am not skinny / pretty enough, so and so doesn’t like me.
I am not a good enough mom.
I don’t have enough money.
I am not successful enough yet.
I am wasting my higher degrees after quitting my big tech job.
I am not authentic enough by using AI.
That last one still catches me. I used to be very resistant to AI, feeling like it was stealing other people’s wisdom or words. Then I realized it actually supports my execution. It inspires me to write deeper, pointing to directions I might not have seen on my own. So instead of making me less authentic, it somehow prompts me to go deeper. Weirdly, it pushes me toward more authenticity, not less.
….
Are they familiar to you?
If not, take note for your cousin 🙂
Now I’ve realized that shame is a feeling; it’s a habit.
Where does this all come from?
It might relate to how the human brain has not evolved much in the last 50,000 years, and it still thinks we live in a cave. To survive, we need to be strong enough to fight and run, liked enough to fit into a tribe and be protected.
Sometimes we are ashamed of the things we did wrong, but the real drive behind it is that we want to make things right. It’s that love, not that shame.
It is the same with how I stepped out of the shame of calling myself a life coach. It’s that love, the desire to support others who are suffering in similar areas, that helps them know who I am.
If shame is just a habit, we can train ourselves to form new habits. Of course we can. Then the question comes to you: Would you like a habit of being ashamed of who you are, or would you like a habit of demonstrating what you love?
The choice is in us and we have the power. I have the power, and you do too.
This is not a topic a lot of people talk about. We always talk about how to overcome or how to get rid of shame, and it becomes like another layer of shame: being ashamed of the shame itself.
What if we allow it to be there, see it as a habit, and take the power of choice back to ourselves? We can demonstrate with actions what we love and just leave shame alone. Slowly, it may go away. It might always be there, but it will not be such a thick layer anymore.
When I am writing about this, I still feel the shame of admitting I have shame about this or that.
Meanwhile, it is okay. All is well. I allow it to be there, and I choose to share these words because I know the shame in you probably has not been allowed to exist for quite a while.
Actually, that is all it wants: to be allowed and to be free. Then, you get the freedom of living out who you truly are and what you love.