Are you looking for someone to talk to in your life? Someone you can trust, go through your thoughts and feelings and know you won’t be judged or invalidated?
It truly is a problem in our society now where people can’t seem to find even one person that can be a confidant, a sounding board, a support through good times and bad.
How is it that we can spend years training doctors, engineers, physicists but yet we don’t spend the time to train someone to be able to listen to another person with respect and compassion?
This is what I’ve been observing in my coaching sessions. People who find value in our sessions not only for what we accomplish and resolve but also just to be heard. Some come and just want another opinion from someone with experience in life more than theirs.
I have some clients who come and say exclusively they value our sessions for the supportive conversation and environment where they can freely express what is going on inside, get some help reflecting and understanding, and they leave with more clarity on what is going on and also where they need to go next.
Is it coaching? Well, maybe not quite the way our coach teachers might define it. But yet I am finding it still can be a big part of the process and coaching engagement. And there is still an agenda and a goal for the session.
Rapport.
Support.
Validation. To be heard. By another human.
Inquiry.
Challenge – yes challenge their current thinking!
Reflection. Encouraged where there were was none before.
Missing areas of thought.
Understanding.
Clarity in what is real and what is perceived.
Sometimes it’s all they need to get moving towards wherever they want to go.
Other times, it’s just the beginning. Once we expose what is truth and what was hidden inside, it opens up other opportunities for resolution where it was cloudy before.
How about you?
Do you have someone in your life that you can confide in, someone with open heart and mind to receive whatever is in your being, honesty to reflect back what is distorted and could be challenged, but yet do it with love and no judgement? How might you develop that skill and state of being yourself?
How might life be if you and others could support each other in this way?
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