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.

Before I became a life coach, I was a life coaching client. I had seen a psychiatrist in college, I was prescribed antidepressants, I've tried things and why did I land at life coaching? (I think my case does a pretty good job at describing the difference between life coaching and therapy)

I wanted more success in my career. I thought, and I fully own this, that all my managers and leaders were bad at their job and I could do so much better. But in order to be at their level I needed to be promoted, I needed to climb up the corporate ladder. The one problem: because I judged them SO hard, it made it very difficult for me to have great networking conversations with them.

I used to be, well actually to rephrase that: my karma dictates that I default to being petty and take things personally. So if I didn't like one thing about you, I wouldn't be able to just put that aside and have a normal relationship with you. I needed to hate you because I had one reason to hate you and that was enough for me.

Needless to say this makes it very difficult to have a professional conversation with someone I don't approve of. And the ego hit it takes for me to be on the asking end of approval... To a person I don't approve of! What a cruel world!

This isn't necessarily a mental health issue, because my judgement wasn't something super obsessive or compulsory. I wasn't depressed (and I knew what depression felt like), I didn't have anger issues, so working with a therapist didn't really sound like an option for me. I could get hypnosis sessions with my dad, but you know how when you work at McDonalds you don't want to eat their chicken tenders? Hypnosis and I have that kind of a relationship.

Then something crossed my mind: my sister was this thing called a "life coach". And perhaps she could give me more information or insight on how life coaches think about these things. And she did a very nice thing for me when I asked her, she connected me to some coaches I can work with and signed me up for a coaching program.

The coaching program was a great success and I was so much happier at work, being able to talk to a lot of different people compared to before. It was truly a night and day difference. And the more coaching sessions I showed up for, the more different perspectives I got into my life. It's like I was learning how to be myself all over again, this time with none of the programming I didn't want.

Or was it?

There's something I noticed as I was working with myself. Some problems were so easy to solve, the problem just completely eradicated itself after one session and I never revisited that topic again. But some topics kept on coming back wearing different clothes, so it's not exactly the same problem but it sort of is. And once you talk about a topic for the third time, you may be the best client in the world but even you start to feel a bit more conscious about bringing that topic up again (although from the coaching perspective, you still definitely should and we encourage you to!).

What is responsible for that difference? Why are some problems sticky while others aren't?

And in relation to yesterday's email. I can't dictate whether someone comes into my coaching program with a sticky problem or a topic that's like tape on an amazon box, ripped by someone who can't wait to open what's inside. With that much variability, how can I market my services confidently?

(Again, there are ways of dealing with this but I opted to actually solve this problem by learning how to deal with any problem)

My naive approach was to learn every problem in depth so I can tackle it. But that means I can never be done learning because with advancing society and different living conditions new mental problems are going to continue to evolve. And also, depression may be an easy problem for one but a sticky one for another but if the solution for them is the same, how can I guarantee that it will work for the sticky case?

When I joined my second coaching certification I learned a different paradigm of solving problems called the Meta Pattern. The Meta Pattern is great and in terms of mechanisms it's very foolproof. But as I was learning and experimenting with the Meta Pattern and applying it into real coaching sessions, I still couldn't shake the doubt off of my head. Is this approach completely going to work with sticky problems? And it didn't take long to find another case where the Meta Pattern just wouldn't land on a client.

That's when I found yet another approach called Unshaming. It was very revolutionary to me at the time because it was flipping the script around: what if your problem wasn't a problem, but your natural intelligence trying to be itself? And the only thing calling it a "problem" is internalized shame that comes from external sources? You can bet I signed the fuck up for that program too.

Then I came to realize yet another limitation. What do you do with a client who doesn't have the aptitude to feel into themselves to listen to their natural intelligence? No methodology passed the two-pronged test of, 1) is this going to work on anybody or is this going to rely on someone's natural characteristics and 2) is this going to work on any problem, sticky or not?

I found the answer very unexpectedly through a video that was playing on my wife's phone.

— Billy