How to Use a Coach or Therapist

It’s occurred to me that a lot of people don’t really know how to use a coach or therapist. I consider this different from not wanting one, not needing one, or not trusting each of these industries. I also don’t mean that most people “wouldn’t implement the advice even if it changes their lives.” I mean most people don’t really know how to use them, in the way that most people don’t know how to use a first-aid kit or a torque wrench—that is, actually not knowing how to use them.

I think it can be pretty customizable for every individual, and so I am reticent with making a list. But there are nice things to know about

Respecting the person who you are meeting with

Ideally you respect the person who you are talking to. There are people who meet with a person they do not respect, because they are making enough progress on their problems. There are also people like seeing their coach or therapist so much they basically forget their problems when they show up and mostly just hang out.

Between these two sides of the axis, there is respecting the person you are working with. You want to at minimum respect the person, and maybe there can be something a lot better than that, but if you do not respect the person you are talking to, you can probably find somebody who you do respect, and that will probably make you happier.

Some people have had the same therapist since they were seven years old. Some people have tried seven therapists in the past year. But every person who has ever used a therapist has at one point only had one therapist in their entire life. And that experience often makes a big impression on the person the possibilities of the profession. If it is a good experience, the person may keep working with this person for a long time. If this is a negative experience, the person may stop using any therapist at all for many years.

Working on problems one at a time

There are many people who can help with many problems! But there is a challenge around working on them in an order that makes sense. A good coach can figure out a pretty good order, but if you have something specific in mind, this is an area in which you know yourself best. The amount of work you want to put in this specific question of which problem you want to be working on actually narrows down what style of coach or therapist can do something good for you.

For example, if you do not want to expend much energy thinking about what problems you want to solve or in what order, there are coaches who will straight up tell you what sucks about you, what to change, what plan to follow, and then yell at you or give you the punishment you signed up for when you do not do it. Some people are really really really into this because they already feel like a worm, actually feel seen and respected when somebody else acknowledges it, and want to give themselves over fully to a process of transformation in this way. There are kind of a lot of these and they tend to advertise themselves pretty aggressively as the kind of people who provide this specific service, and not something else, because they want people to buy what they are selling, and not be confused about what exactly they are buying.

For this kind of person, another style may be helpful, which is a person who is very patient and actually very slowly gets you to reveal parts of yourself, so that they have more information about you that they can methodically and delicately coprocess with you, such that in learning gently to be transparent to them you also become transparent with yourself.

These people can actually be extremely advanced, and actually not put themselves out there very much in terms of advertising, so to find these you might either just get lucky or run into one of them when looking around at many options.

….to be continued!