The Life Coaching Connection: How Coaching Changes Lives by Steve Chandler

Author:Steve Chandler [Chandler, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Robert D. Reed Publishers
Published: 2011-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

32. Juicy and Sometimes a Little Messy

I’ve been trying to stress, as a positive, exciting thing, that the best life coaches are the ones least likely to conform to anything.

They are the least likely to have practices that resemble Gabriel Byrne’s laid-back psychologist on the “In Treatment” TV show.

Let’s take, for example, Dr. Alison Arnold, whose website is called “Scream and Run Naked.”

Can you see the provocative difference? Alison also has a book out by the same title. Her clients refer to life coach Ali as an “Awakener,” “Fear liberator,” and “Sparkplug.” She’s also an athletic coach who works with the United States Olympic gymnastics team. She’s also a reality TV star who coached Scott Baio in front of the cameras for a long, hard season.

She’s known as “Doc Ali” to her clients, and a rather resistant Baio, who feared her direct, confrontational tough-love coaching started calling her “Dark Alley” on the show. She was a place he didn’t want to go. Transformation often looks frightening before you go there.

Ali’s success is extraordinary, and like all the best coaches I know, she also enjoys being coached. She’s been coached by the best and recalled,

“Just sitting in the room with Steve Hardison changed my perception of myself and the world. My head spun as I argued with my own limitations while sitting before me was a man who completely mirrored my amazing greatness and beauty. And the way he did it blew me away. My whole being was being flooded with his intensity, and passion, about all I am, have always been, and ways I could give my gift to the world. I have been changed with every meeting I have had with Steve. Not only by the insights about my life, but more importantly through the inspiration of the way he lives his. He lives it fearlessly, lovingly, and without apology. What a model!”

Ali brings up something very important here—that factor called modeling. The best life coaches work on themselves as aggressively as they work on their clients. They want to model how it’s done. Unlike a consultant or therapist who only talks, a great coach will be willing to live it for you.

Dr. Alison Arnold is very open about sharing what she has lived and remembers thinking at one time:

“I am going to Nepal to learn how to die. That cheerful thought abruptly popped me out of my morning meditation. Lovely. I was already a little nervous about this trip. Never one to give up, I took several deep, calming breaths, closed my eyes again, and immediately became aware of another question moving among the rising and falling thoughts of my chattering mind: “Have I learned yet how to live?”

Ali asked me to introduce her at a bookstore event she was speaking at when Scream and Run Naked first came out. I was glad to do it. Her book is one I highly recommend. In it she writes,

As we flounder along in our never-ending pursuit of happiness, we are sometimes seized by what the poet David Whyte calls “unnamed longings.

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