Life Coaching

I got a free life coaching session today, with the quid pro quo that I would write about it afterwards in hopefully glossy terms, hopefully for a glossy. Before the session, my thoughts on life coaches were a bit sceptical, as it seemed to me to be a glorified form of counselling, a bit of an indulgence for people who could afford to pay. But afterwards I surprised myself by seriously thinking about going back.

It is an indulgence; there is no other way to describe it. But we indulge ourselves in so many things – cigarettes, alcohol, just ‘one’ piece of cake, those new clothes, that DVD – and none of these will make you feel as good for so long. So why not forego some other indulgences and try something that is designed to help you achieve your aims? At least, that is the way I am now thinking, which does make me wonder if there was a shiny pendulum clock within my sight line in the room...

“You will come back, you will come back…”

Of course, I talked about wanting to finish this novel, and not only finish it but to find an agent who is willing to go that extra mile for me and a publisher who will be thrilled to take on my book and get it out into the world. Scarily, we gave this ambition a date – Feb 20th 2008. Blimey…

We also talked about my confidence (lack of), which is probably something I need to address, such as when people ask me the age old question ‘so, what do you do?’ I nearly always mutter to my feet something like ‘umm, sort of write stuff, articles, that sort of thing’, which isn’t the most prepossessing way of announcing what you do for a living. Interestingly, we worked out that although I do write articles and get published, I seem to have decided a long time ago that unless I am an author with an actual book in the shops, then anything else I do is meaningless. Talk about giving yourself something hard to live up to…

It was actually quite painful in places talking about this, I do hate people suddenly seeing the ‘real me’, as I guess I keep myself quite hidden. Even here… is ‘Jayne Ferst’ my real name? Maybe… but maybe not! I remember once telling a teacher I wanted to be a writer, and he considered me thoughtfully before saying that most writers are nearly always on the outside of life looking in, and he could see that within me… do you know, I nearly cried, it was awful to hear him suddenly speak my heart. And today, even though I was not cold, I was shivering as we were speaking, which apparently was because I was talking about something that meant so much to me.

Anyway, before I waffle on into oblivion, we set targets and goals to achieve ‘for next time’ (yeah, I did notice that!), and I felt very positive, like I had just offloaded some junk that was taking up space. Is this worth swapping some pleasures for? I seem to think it probably is… let’s face it, the more people you have rooting for you, the better, right?