I'm in the middle of dedicating some emails to give you a full personal history of what got me into life coaching, and why I coach in the way that I do. If you're joining in for the story with this email, you can catch up here.

One day my wife was laying down on the sofa, watching a YouTube video in the background as she was resting after a hard day's work of teaching people pilates. Around this time I was working on writing books, making online courses, and whatnot so I was usually keeping myself occupied in my room.

Then every once in a while my wife would burst into laughter. I'd peek my head out of my room to ask her what was so funny and she'd tell me this video featuring a Buddhist monk was hilarious.

That was my first introduction to who would ultimately be my teacher, Venerable Pomnyun Sunim.

He is famous in Korea for hosting dharma talks that are casual conversations rather than a structured teaching coming from an altar. He encourages people to ask him anything, as long as it's not something that can be easily google-able. But more details about him aside, what got me interested in these videos was that he was basically doing live life coaching.

Most of the times I would listen to the questioner ask their question, think of how I would coach them, and listen to sunim reply. Most of the time he answered exactly in the direction I would offer, and that gave me some validation. Some times he would answer in terms of Buddhist practices like the 108 bows, but more on that some other time.

What really caught my attention was when he would answer completely differently from how I would answer it. One of the conversations that stood out the most was when a questioner asked about their strained relationship with their parent because they were emotionally abusive to them. They never felt loved by their parents and now too much time has passed under neglect, they feel powerless to live their life in a happy way.

How would I approach this? This happens to be a topic that's super close to my heart because I felt like my childhood was dominated by the influence of my parents' parenting. So I would make sure that the client feels heard, that they feel supported, and that they find ways to be resourceful in their current state, and so on and so forth.

But what I heard in the video was very shocking, and to be honest a little bit anger-inducing. The monk replied, "You're so deluded, you can't even see fortune when it's staring at you in the eyes".

How could he say such a thing?

You know, if someone says something that I don't agree with but it's backed by something I can't relate to at all (like pay this much to this holy ghost and circle around clockwise fifteen times), I just lose interest. But based on other videos the monk is somewhat on the same frequency as I am, so I got intensely curious as to the rationale of why he would say such a thing.

Understanding his rationale became the pivotal point for my coaching. Take a look at what I would have offered, according to above.

• Making sure the client feels heard
• Ensuring they feel supported
• Find ways to be resourceful in their current state

There's a big, grand, underlying assumption behind all of the things I would offer. And the monk is directly shattering my big, grand, underlying assumption.

It is that their parents are a reason to suffer.

You see, everything I would offer is a distraction from the fact that their parents ARE bad parents. They WERE not loved. And therefore they DO have reasons to suffer. Can you still move forward in this state? Yes, by working with your cognitive capacity you can make the best... out of this bad situation.

My coaching at that time never gives you the option to leave this domain of life that's been rendered bad by a condition. And that is EXACTLY what my clients left with, without a resolution: sure, did they work on their life? Yes, but have they found happiness that... requires them to be born again? No.

All because I worked with the assumption that their life is a bad, sad life ruined by suffering.

The monk was shattering this illusion. Why is your parents' expression of love, to the BEST OF THEIR ABILITY, an undeniable proof of lack of love? If they truly didn't love you, why did they shelter you, feed you, and dress you? Not going into all the details about this particular case, but his words demolish the entire platform that I used to coach my clients on. That there is a reason to suffer.

Since then I took a very particular interest in Buddhism to learn more about this approach to resolving suffering from life. And I got to learn that this was the solution I had been searching for my whole career: there is no one right way that resolves everything. Everything comes to be due to specific conditions, and therefore to dismantle something you have to work on the specific condition that gives arising to it.

And "everything" literally meant everything. This includes the two questions I was looking to answer: 1) will this work for ALL clients, and 2) will this work on sticky problems? Yes to 1), because there is NOTHING exempt from the mechanism of dependent arising and yes to 2) because sticky problems have conditions and thus it can be worked on.

So now that I know this, what do I do with this knowledge? The first thing is to remove suffering from my own life. And thus began my 1000 day practice to change the trajectory of my life by confronting my karma.

— Billy