The Truth About Coaching

[00:00:00] Speaker A: The world of healing can be treacherous, but suddenly Spiritual aims to provide real, honest, practical spiritual knowledge and wisdom for the true seekers among us. The goal is to ignite the divine human within each listener, raising the collective consciousness for our planet. We will challenge your preconceptions, push your buttons, and encourage deep reflect. We're not here to adhere to the status quo of what the new age spiritual market wants you to buy into and believe. Consider this your antidote to the woo, woo and a place of woo. You. [00:00:54] Speaker B: We've been talking a lot about purpose, how to find your purpose, how to not get distracted by other things that potentially could lead you to your purpose. And this is such a big topic. And Sean and I were talking about this right before we started to record this podcast. But this is a huge topic and guess what? Other people know that too. And when I mean other people, I mean people who have created entire coaching businesses on helping you find your purpose. There are just weekend courses, and we've talked about this before with spiritual influencers, how there are people out there who will take a course for Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and by Monday they're charging US$300 an hour to help people find their purpose. And many times their purpose is creating other coaches to help other people find their purpose, who then beget more people who become coaches to help other people find their purpose. And this has become an industry. Like the coaching industry is huge. And now be very clear, two of my dearest friends have been coaches for almost 20 years and they have a very specific modality that they work with and they are incredibly successful with people actually finding their purpose. And it has nothing to do with them turning people into coaches or converting people into coaches to use some sales language. So there are legitimate coaches out there who are excellent at what they do, but they also have many other skills, talents and abilities. And they are very much the exception. They're the 1% of coaches out there that I could say, wow, they're really getting people to the next level. They listen to people, they have other skills and talents, as I said, that work with people in a way where all the processes and questions that Sean and I have been talking about, they go through that in even further depth and detail with people within their coaching relationship. And they get people to leave corporate careers, become artists. Whatever their heart's desire and their purpose drives them towards, they help them get there. But again, the friends that I'm referring to are the exception. They're not the rule. There are tons of coaches out there who will sell you a $199 program that will get you from being miserable to being fully in your purpose. You know, for their Black Friday deal, it was just Thanksgiving here in the United States of America. So Cyber Monday is tomorrow, and Black Friday, I. If I get one more email or text message selling me a program, I've. I've gone on an unsubscribing spree where I've just unsubscribed like it was my job, and it feels liberating. And we're gonna do a podcast on how to unsubscribe from the noise of the digital space. It has become just outrageous and egregious. I don't know what your experience has been, Sean, with the coaches who tell you that they can help you find your purpose even though you already have your purpose. [00:04:34] Speaker A: I just did the same thing. I've been getting all these Black Friday, and because I'm in the music industry and I have all this software, I'm on all these email lists, and I did the same thing. I looked at all of my monthly expenses, and I went, why am I. Basically, I was subscribing to everything, and I have this sense now of urgency as far as efficiency and not wanting to waste time. And then I'm like, well, I'm sitting here watching this movie. Yes, I'm an artist, and I need to live to be an artist. But at the same time, I'm like, well, I got all this stuff to do. So I did the exact same thing. That's why I was smiling when you said it. I went. And I canceled pretty much all my subscriptions except one. And it was music ones. And, yeah, I'm going through the same thing. But when we talk about. And by the way, folks, there will be no links in the description or show notes to coaches. That's not what we do here, in case anybody was wondering. No sales funnel. It was just bringing up, as you were talking about, that people who are being suddenly spiritual who are discovering this, and I was guilty of this. Initially, you get excited and you want to share your discoveries with other people, and more often than not, they're not open to it because they're on their own journey. Then you'll get the people, like you said, who are so excited. Then a switch kind of flips, and then they're like, yeah, I'm done. I've learned everything. Let me help other people. So may initially be from the benevolent point of view where, yeah, I figured this out. This was really great. And then it can be a perpetual Thing, like you said, let's just create more coaches. And then at the end of the day, I think it morphs into taking advantage of people who are rudderless. As we were saying in the other episode previous to this, where for me, you can tell right away that there's something amiss here, where there's an agenda, every interaction is transactional, or it's one way. For me, I discovered I forgot the saying, but it's just, you know, the teacher is it the student will appear when the teacher's ready, or vice versa. [00:07:15] Speaker B: The teacher will appear or when the student is ready? [00:07:18] Speaker A: Well, I think it's both, actually. Having been a teacher, I think my students appeared when. And then I learned more than them by teaching. What I found was when I needed sort of the guidance, something, someone, some circumstance came about. But for me, the best teachers I've seen in this realm are the ones who don't tell you what to do, but they kind of just poke you in the right direction or they'll the answer to your question is a question and they force you to be internal. And at the end of the day, at some point you figure out, oh yeah, I have to figure this all out for myself. And they're guiding you gently and having you still do the work, as opposed to a transactional, capitalistic sort of interaction where, oh yeah, I'm going to fix you and you'll be perfect. Just I need money. [00:08:21] Speaker B: Fixing. [00:08:23] Speaker A: That's the other F word we have. There's fear and then fixing. [00:08:27] Speaker B: Yes, I was about to say I was. You just led me right to it. The other F word is fixing. On this podcast, we don't believe that people are broken. We believe that they're whole and sovereign and there's nothing to fix. There's just things that you can do to get you more back into a space of alignment for yourself. It's not. I don't believe in brokenness, Sean. You don't believe in brokenness? That we're broken. And certainly. And say, if you were to subscribe to the brokenness philosophy, wouldn't you be the mechanic? It wouldn't be someone outside of yourself to be the mechanic. They don't have the owner's manual. If you want to subscribe to brokenness, which I invite you to gently release that construct of being broken. If you would like to subscribe to that, I ask you to unsubscribe. The fixing that you would do is fixing that only you would know how to do. A coach could perhaps help guide you if they were A skilled. Let me put in the disclaimer. A skilled, experienced coach could help you get to your own answers. But at the end of the day, you have all of the answers inside because you're the one who is you. No one else has your user manual, owner's manual. There's this tenant or this idea in psychology called cognitive dissonance, and it gets thrown around a lot. But cognitive dissonance is this state of discomfort felt when two or more things or thoughts contradict each other. And so when these cognitions or these thoughts clash with each other, then it has people telling others or promoting their line of thinking in order to make themselves feel like they're doing the right thing. So for instance, if I'm a coach and I have maybe a little flavor of maybe being a coach is not the right thing for me, I don't know if the coaching modality is the best thing that I learned, but I have this stronger pull to promote being a coach, then I am going to. That discomfort is going to make, is going to propel me to tell Sean that he needs to become a coach just like me. Like being, being a coach is the best thing in the world. You have to do it, Sean, because of that discomfort, that internal discomfort that I have, and people do it with what I've seen the most recently being around my family is having kids and being married. People have contradicting thoughts, feelings, beliefs about being married or having children. But because they're in the state of being married and having children, they have to promote being married and having children to others in order to soothe their own internal emotional discomfort. [00:11:34] Speaker A: Some people should not be coaches. I've seen this so many times where someone is a coach, they're certified, they got a piece of paper, a certificate, okay? And then they're charging people money. And it's really a one way street. Like you could see their finger coming out. They're lecturing, you gotta do this, you gotta do this, you gotta do this. And then I look at their life and I go, oh my God, your life is a shit show. How are you a coach? It's really interesting when you're bringing up the cognitive dissonance because basically they're avoiding their problems or the things they need to fix by helping other people, quote, unquote, fix their problems and not helping themselves. So the whole exercise of, I guess denying or just putting everything in a box and just putting it away for a while, and as you said that too, it popped into my mind and again, no judgment here, we're Extensively talking about that word. And it popped into my mind, some people shouldn't be parents for the same exact reason. Now, am I a parent? No. Would I be a great parent? I have no idea. I would like to think so, but I don't know. And I'm not in that circumstance. So, okay, me saying some people shouldn't be parents. What I mean by that, objectively, objectively is just that you can see it's what we're talking about where. And what you just said, where they kind of did it to do it, but they're not really into it. It's like something they think they should have done. And again, I don't know people's life circumstances. I'm seeing a snapshot here and there and not painting a broad brush, but there are individual circumstances, I know as far as relatives and stuff like that, where I can see over a period of time, I'm seeing that, the tendencies. And you know, we talked about this in previous episodes too. But look at the overall picture. If you are looking for guidance, make sure it's. It's guidance. It's. For me, it was, where do I start? And what are some tools I can use to do the work for myself? Like you said, as opposed to it being final transactional, I'm done. Be very wary of that sort of capitalistic transactional mindset. And it's very hard to undo that. I'm still working on it. And because I have this internal dialogue and I'm as self aware as I can be in, in this moment, I'm realizing that my thinking patterns are not necessarily created for the benefit of me. When we talk about the education system and the way the world works and the goals of the education system having been inside of it. And when you bring up that word cognitive dissonance, I've seen many instances because I can have the time to contemplate this, where that's happened, where my internal ness, Sean Ness, the who I am ness was directly contradicting things I was doing because I thought I should have done it. And this goes with career number one, I think for most people is career. So when we have these two big words, this cognitive dissonance where you feel one way but you're kind of going through the motions and doing it the other way. But you know, there's a rub there. What can people do to maybe ease that friction and recognize it? [00:15:50] Speaker B: It's so interesting. I was walking through Target, which is a big box retailer in the US and I was seeing these group, this group of Girls, they may have been like 15 or 16 years old. And I remembered how I was at that age and I thought about peer pressure because they were basically kind of picking bullying on this one girl who was with them, who didn't want to. I think they were making fun of her because she wasn't drinking Starbucks, which is like, I guess in 15, 16 year old land is like a cardinal sin or something at this point because they want to fit in at that time and age. And I thought about how cognitive dissonance and peer pressure are very much the same thing. It's just the grown up version. Cognitive dissonance is the grown up version of peer pressure in a way. And I started to think about where I would get peer pressured as a kid or as a teenager. And I have to say, because I was so different and we talked about this in the last episode, about not fitting in and being different because I was so different and because I felt it was almost futile to try to fit in, I wouldn't allow peer pressure to get to me as much and I wouldn't do what the in quote unquote crowd did. And I think when people are in vulnerable spaces and they're trying to find their purpose and a coach comes in and maybe they have friends who've gone through a coaching program and so they're being peer pressured into doing that because, oh, you don't have anything going on. Here's the thing that can help you get out of that. It could be very attractive and very negative because then you start doing things that you don't want to do just out of desperation. So I think there are some questions you can ask yourself when you're in that space where maybe you're not feeling your best, maybe you are in a place of desperation, maybe you're in a place of frustration or even apathy where you're kind of giving up and surrendering and you don't know what to do. The first question I would ask to help understand what's going on and help you to make decisions that are going to be beneficial to you versus get you into a deeper hole. Because these coaching programs can become very expensive very quickly. I think you can ask yourself, what are you actually looking for? What are you actually seeking? Is it accountability? Because if it's accountability, you can find accountability partners through social media platforms where you could have or even Reddit threads where you have a partner or a group of people who have the same types of goals. And you could have an accountability partner. You don't need to Hire a coach specifically for that. What if it is trying to actually find what your purpose is and you feel very lost? This is a place where there needs to be more organized, dedicated introspection and self awareness. So how I've always been able to cultivate that is through a meditative practice. There are 45 million different YouTube videos on meditation. I suggest you start with something simple, simply mindfulness based meditation. You can find multiple videos again on YouTube. Jon Kabat Zinn is the very first meditation teacher that I followed his practices first. So it's just called mindfulness based meditation. It's very simple. It's all about infusing more mindfulness into your every day. And the meditations are accessible. You can, as I said, find them on YouTube. You can find them on Insight Timer, which is an app. Again they're free on YouTube. So a mindfulness practice or some sort of meditative practice. Also there is another practice called tapping or eft. It's emotional freedom Technique also can be found free. Yeah, where you tap the meridian points and there are certain mantras that are said in conjunction with tapping, like physical tapping with two fingers on your hand and you're just tapping certain points. Um, Brad, I believe his name is Bradley Yates. He has hundreds if not thousands of tapping videos on YouTube. Again, free. I want to give free resources here as as much as possible. These are people that I have personal experience working with their modalities. So that's why I'm talking through them with you guys. So meditative practice, tapping practice, Emotional freedom technique, physical movement in nature as much as possible. Nature is one of the greatest medicines that exists. So going out into nature wherever. I know it's very cold in North America right now and I know in South America there's lots of rain cause it's rainy season. But if you can get into nature even for 20 minutes a day, as much as possible. Forest bathing. I know Sean and I have spoken about forest bathing in the past, but getting out into nature as much as possible is also a really good way to ease and clear your mind and get you back into a place of center. So those are a few things that I would recommend to help you understand. Help you find what your looking for. To help you find what you're actually trying to find. [00:21:55] Speaker A: I completely agree with what what you're saying and it's funny because I've just been exploring new avenues as far as my spiritual journey and trying to grow as much as possible.