On Wednesday, I jumped on a Zoom call with a newsletter reader.

As we chatted away about careers, coaching and life more generally, he asked me this:

“Tom, how do you handle the responsibility of potentially affecting people’s life decisions?”

What a great question.

Thing is, the world is full of coaches who are chomping at the bit to play the guru role. These are the coaches who preach action equals progress, hand out advice like confetti and hold you accountable to what they’ve told you to do.

i.e. coaches who think they know best.

But my coaching is a complete 180 from this.

When it comes to living your life, I KNOW I don’t know best.

Frankly, the idea that I'd get to tell you what to do with your life is naive and arrogant.

The only person who knows how to live your life is you.

So when I sit opposite a client on a coaching call, there’s no checklists, roadmaps or action plans. I'm not making suggestions or handing out advice.

Instead, we’re exploring how life really works. That means seeing the nature of thought and how it impacts our experience. It means discovering how we connect with our innate wisdom and creativity. It means getting eyes for the barriers we’re innocently putting in our own way. And it means noticing how we already have the answers we’re looking for. 

I know just how jarring it can be when a coach takes the opposite approach.

I still remember a jolt of resistance when an old coach of mine casually said:

“Tom, we’ll get those daily emails of yours down to weekly”

I’ve written about this before. And how that comment made me feel like something meaningful was under threat and how it bulldozed straight over what mattered to me. 

It wasn’t his decision to make. 

Truthfully, I think this is why I was drawn to the coaching I do.

I don’t want to sideline anyone’s wisdom or clarity.

I want to help other people tune into what they hear deep down. And get more familiar with the part of them that inevitably leads to actions which are so fulfilling, so authentic and so aligned to the truest essence of who they are that they stop chasing the life they think they should want and start living the life they do want.

So back to the question:

How do I handle the responsibility of potentially affecting people’s life decisions?

By handing that responsibility back to the only person it ever belonged to anyway.

If you’d like to tune out the noise, stop second guessing yourself and move forward in a way that feels calm, clear and 100% you, I currently have ONE spot available to take on a new 1-on-1 client.

You can read more about my coaching here:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com

But there’s no waiting list right now.

So if you have questions or you’d like to explore what working together would look like, the easiest thing to do is hit reply and we’ll take it from there.

Have a great weekend.

To fulfilment,

Tom