Victoria Mary Clarke

How a Life Coach saved my Life

How a Life Coach saved my Life, copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003

‘A life coach? You’ve got to be kidding! I’ll run your life for you. I’ll charge you half what she’s charging.”
            A fairly typical reaction, when I announce that I’m about to engage the services of a life coach.
            ‘She charges how much?!!!!”
            Consternation, when I tell them how much.
            ‘Jaysus, there’s money to be made out of this racket. How long is the training?”
            Foaming at the mouth now.
‘How long? Six months! A hundred euros an hour?”
An intense mixture of indignation now, and admiration for whoever can get away with this. As it happens, Ann Kelly is working with me pro-bono. But if I were a regular client, she would be charging quite a lot of money. And it is true that anyone can train to be a coach, in a relatively short space of time. There doesn’t appear to be any law against you or I setting ourselves up in business tomorrow, with no qualifications. And yes, coaching first became popular with Americans and celebrities, so you’ve got to be a bit sceptical. But never being one to knock a thing until I’ve tried it, I did try it. And not only is it worth it, I am prepared to make the extravagant claim that my life coach has saved my life.
I wasn’t about to die, physically, when I met Ann. But mentally, emotionally and spiritually I was abandoning ship. The hopes and dreams I’d had as a kid had long since died. If you had told me, at the age of sixteen that I would not be a millionaire by my twenty first birthday, I would have laughed in your face. Enormously ambitious at that age, I was confident that I would be a movie-star by twenty and a supermodel/ fashion designer/ best-selling author as well. So confident was I that I didn’t think I needed to do anything to make this stuff happen, except wait.
By the age of thirty five, I was still waiting. To add to this, I had recently broken up with my lover and partner of fifteen years. I had moved to Dublin where I was now broke, single, approaching forty and sharing a bedroom with my ten year old nephew. A long long long way from being a millionaire/ supermodel / movie-star. I had been prone to depression from the age of twelve, but it was getting worse. Now it was all I could do to get out of bed and microwave a TV dinner. Friends didn’t know what to say, because what could they say? I wanted someone to take me away from my life. And then the miracle happened.
I should mention here that I have always been interested in the really big questions. Like is there a God? And if there is, why am I not a supermodel? To this end I have learned to contact my guardian angels and I often ask them to guide me, even in my deepest depressions. And on this occasion, they guided me to Ann Kelly, the life coach. Who met with me in a hotel, and asked me what I wanted out of life, what I wanted to achieve.
I didn’t believe that any of the things I wanted were achievable. But I did want to write a book about my conversations with angels because talking to angels was the one thing that made me feel safe and loved and looked after, when I could be bothered to make time for it. Immediately, Ann wanted to know what I was doing, in order to achieve this particular goal. Well, I said, I was waiting. Waiting for what? Waiting for inspiration, waiting for Divine intervention, waiting for the right time, just waiting, I said. Procrastinating, she said. By the end of the first session, I had agreed to set time aside, every day, to talk to my angels and work on this book. We would meet in a week’s time, and discuss my progress.
At no stage did Ann actually tell me what to do, although she did tell me what she thought about what I was doing and not doing. We negotiated the homework that I would do for the following week, every week and quite often, I didn’t do the homework. When this happened, we would discuss my motivation and try to find out what was putting me off. As it turned out, I was afraid to show my work to my agent in case she didn’t like it. And I was right. She hated it. I was upset, but didn’t take to the bed. Instead, I started making phone calls to new agents, as agreed with Ann. Resulting in a meeting with Marianne Gunn O’ Connor who had just negotiated a spectacular deal for Cecilia Aherne and who offered to sign me up herself. A massive breakthrough, procrastination-wise.
We’ve been doing it for a year. I haven’t always looked forward to our sessions. Much of the time, I have dreaded them. Because it is a requirement that you be honest with yourself and this isn’t always pleasant. I didn’t like to admit, for instance, that despite my ambition to be rich, I was in the habit of ignoring my finances completely. My philosophy being that if you ignored a problem for long enough, it would go away. I was persuaded, reluctantly, to open all the bills and bank statements that I had shoved in a box and to add up what I was spending and what I was earning and subtract one from the other. Very scary. But it’s nice to put the card in the cash-point without wondering if there’s anything in there.
My previous approach had been to cry about the things I didn’t like, to stay in bed more, eat more chocolate, drink more wine and watch more telly. Ann calls that avoidance. When asked what I intended to do about the damp, dark dingy bedsit that I had moved into and which I hated passionately, my inclination was to avoid thinking about it. Instead, I found myself moving into a bigger, brighter, friendlier place which I like being in. She can do the same thing with boyfriends, she assures me.
The driving principle behind coaching is that you, the client, have all of the answers to your own problems, you just need to have them coaxed out of you. And it worked. I didn’t even need Prozac. Which is why I am willing to say that my life has been saved by the life coach. A life of depression really didn’t seem worth it, so who knows where I was headed.
Coaching is not therapy, Ann likes to emphasise. The reason it cured me, I believe, is down to my own need for structure and for reframing my negative thoughts about life so that instead of thinking about how awful and unbearable everything was, I began to take steps to change things and to build my confidence. And it’s an ongoing process, there’s plenty more to work on. But I can say that I’m no longer depressed, in fact, much of the time I’m now suspiciously happy.
Wondering if it works for other people too, I introduced life coaching to Una, an artist friend who was terrified to have an exhibition. A couple of months later, she had her first solo show and sold more than half the work. This, she says, was inconceivable before she got coached.
“I have very limiting beliefs,’ she says. ‘Or atleast I did, until Ann came along. She encouraged me to regard problems as opportunities to stretch my creativity and find solutions. It worked in every area of my life, even the worst possible situations, like dealing with builders!’
So what’s the difference between paying a coach and getting a friend to listen to you?
“It’s mainly about structure,’ says Mary Curran, from the Coaching From the Heart Centre, in Dublin. ‘Your friend’s responses will depend on her own agenda, what she thinks is best for you and best for her, because she is emotionally involved with you. The coach will ask a series of questions designed to facilitate uncovering your motivation. Whereas your friend might well just tell you you’re a lazy feck!’
‘Life coaching gets right to the nuts and bolts, it cuts through the facades that we all put up,” says Bryan Ryan, a former IT company director and now trainee coach. “It goes right to the soul and exposes the vulnerability that we all feel, deep down. And that’s where you have to start if you want to really make changes. It’s also shown me how much we all need to have a good chat and be listened to!’