When people who are new to coaching ask me about the overarching coaching process, I still find myself conflicted about how best to respond. In my very personal experience, there are two kinds of answers. One kind is more comforting and popular, and the other kind is decidedly less so. One kind can make you feel like a failure as a client, and the other kind can make you feel like a failure as a coach.

The more comforting, popular kind of answer is the kind that is easy to sketch on handy-dandy cocktail napkins with basic shapes and arrows. It lays out a straightforward approach from goal-setting to transformation, challenge to resolution, question to answer. It assumes that you have goals just itching to be scratched, and that said goals can be clearly defined and subdivided, the challenges readily identifiable and explorable, and all obstacles surmountable by sheer force of will and relentless reframing. It requires that the goals you have are steadfast and unchanging, that they stay like perfectly trained dogs for as long as it takes to achieve them.

Above all, this kind of answer colludes with the notion that things are fundamentally linear in nature—that there are progressive steps and stages, and if only we can know exactly what those steps and stages are (or buy access to the privilege of that information), we can design our path to each successive milestone and navigate our lives with greater ease and enviable aplomb. We won’t need to suffer any more than is strictly necessary to advance; maybe, if we’re working with the right guru or expert, we can even sidestep the stages that feel too hard. When whatever we’ve doing is not working, we may believe that we must be doing something wrong. We must not have understood or executed the plan properly. We must not want it badly enough. We must be wired too differently.  

Perhaps pause and consider: What expectations and assumptions do you have around progress in any of the following areas of your life?

• Your career or area of expertise
• Your business or side hustle or passion project
• Your productivity
• Your practice of anything
• Your grieving of any loss, tangible or intangible
• Your experience of any transition, voluntary or involuntary
• Your romantic relationships
• Your familial relationships
• Your social relationships
• Your physical health
• Your emotional health
• Your mental health
• Your recovery from anything, including burnout
• Your children’s development
• Your development

It’s a short list of things that would be so much easier to experience if they were as linear in nature as we’d like to hope. When they’re not—when we believe in the illusion of steps and trajectories—our disappointment curdles into shame and judgment. We judge ourselves, others, and the world around us for failing to live up to our expectations.

That’s what I see with the first kind of answer. It’s the kind of answer we’re generally socialized to believe in and buy into because regressing and backtracking are just so “unproductive.” (Exactly what are we trying so hard to produce?)

Here is a less popular kind of answer. It doesn’t sound like an answer. It’s harder to convey. It normalizes not yet knowing what we want and questions how we can begin to know when so many parts of ourselves want so many different things. It admits that progress is neither linear nor predictable, and that there is a longer, messier “messy middle” to any transition than most people would like. There are no trails and mile-markers, but rivers and rapids. There are feelings of accelerating and decelerating, cresting and falling over leaps, dips, waves, and spirals. There is motion and rest, growth and dormancy, clarity and confusion, gathering and scattering. There are cumulative changes and stacked losses, ungrieved grief and unresolved hurt. There are systems we create and perpetrate, resist and dismantle. There are questions to ask and answers to question, beginnings to end and endings to begin.  

As we explore these experiences with compassion and curiosity, we discover more and more our capacity to be fully alive to the world and our place in it. We learn how to be our own self, and we learn how to live our own life.

This beautiful, non-linear life.