I’m a life coach, and I’m in an awful mood

The best life coaches teach clients to accept the full range of human emotion. So why do we all show up with the same relentlessly positive tone?

Image by Lucija Rasonja from Pixabay

The tone of the mindset-coaching world is relentlessly upbeat. Which seems to make sense, given that mindset coaching promises to give you power over how you experience the world. Why would someone promise that they can help you feel better, and then turn around and also tell you that they feel fucking terrible? It wouldn’t exactly be good advertising.

But it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. In general mindset-coaching tools enable you to change how you think and feel about your circumstances, but elite practitioners in the field advise against attempting to use mindset tools to maintain a constantly positive emotional state. For one thing, there are events we want to feel bad about — like the death of a loved one. For another, trying to achieve consistent happiness turns out to be a self-defeating goal, because being eternally vigilant against the threat of negative emotion is not actually all that fun. Instead, clients learn tools that make negative emotions easier to accept and process, which frees them up to go after their dreams.

This is the kind of mindset work I learned, and it has a lot more in common with some Buddhist teachings about the inevitability of pain than the #positivevibesonly crew might lead you to think. It’s from life coaching that I started to learn how to accept even negative emotions I had spent years trying to eradicate in myself, especially competition and envy.

The issue is that very little of this full range of emotions shows up in the public face that mindset coaches show to the world. By this I don’t mean actual coaching, where the coach’s own experience necessarily takes a backseat to the client’s. I mean all the ways we share our ideas and techniques and views of the world, on Instagram and medium and podcasts and blogs and newsletters. Those are the places where our own emotional experience sets the tone, and the tone is almost universally positive.

To be clear: this isn’t about lying. It’s about how we are naturally drawn to tell a certain facet of the truth when we turn up to talk about what we know. People are life coaches because they love coaching, and because coaching tools have changed their lives. I know, because this is exactly how I feel. Of course it’s fun to recount how much better I feel since I learned X thing and to explain to other people how they can use X to feel better too. Feeling better is great, and so is helping other people feel better. We aren’t being disingenuous; we aren’t playing at being upbeat for marketing purposes. We really believe that what we are offering makes amazing things possible, because we’ve lived it. No wonder we sound positive.

Add to that the fact that, even if we have been suffering, we usually start to teach about that suffering once we’ve solved whatever problem we’ve been having. Even if we talk how shitty we felt, it’s from the vantage point of no longer feeling that way. We share solutions, not problems. That seems to be our job, after all.

But as result, we are creating a disconnect for our clients between the emotional range we demonstrate in how we show up to teach, and the emotional range we teach our clients to accept in their own lives. We tell our clients that they should accept that sometimes they will feel enraged, depressed, angry, defeated and despairing— and then, post after post, newsletter after newsletter, we show up with a smile on our faces and a happy ending to our stories.

We preach accepting the full 360 of feelings, and then we present the same combination of determination, excitement and hope over and over and over and over again.

And then we wonder why our clients keep blaming themselves for still feeling shitty.

I don’t have a solution to this problem. I’m not going to tie this up in a pretty bow and speak to you from the other side, with everything sorted for myself. Three things I can say with certainty, though:

1. Coaching has 100% changed my life, and I never thought I could be as happy as I now am on a consistent basis.
2. I still feel terrible routinely. Today I want to smash every dish in my fucking house.
3. I can still coach the bejeezus out of my clients no matter what kind of day I’m having.

The major difference coaching has made to these kinds of shitty days for me is that there’s still some small part of me that remembers they will pass. But when I’m in it, I’m in it. All the way in it.

As we all are, routinely. Not accidentally, not because we forgot how to mindset for a minute, but as a consistent and normal part of life. As my coach taught me to say to myself: welcome to the human condition.

I’m a coach, academic, and writer. Contact me at info@janeelliottphd.com.