Message from the Executive Vice President
Dear HKICC Friends
In today's environment, where most coaches identify themselves as "Executive Coaches" or "Business Coaches", a Life Coach is rather rare; the title perhaps even a little cliched, particularly in a city like Hong Kong. I still get asked "What is a Life Coach?" It's easier to understand the role of a business or executive coach. Most still find it hard to understand why anyone would need a Life Coach, and how their life could benefit from having one.
As a Life Coach myself, perhaps my view is biased, but I would advocate that everyone could benefit from having a coach, including life coaches themselves. And the best way for me to answer the question of how one could benefit from being supported by a coach would be for me to use myself as an example, and explain how coaching has benefited me, both, in being coached as well as being a coach.
As a woman of Asian culture I was brought up to be somewhat submissive, and was rewarded for being so. In certain cultures, such as the one I was brought up in, there tends to be a level of negative judgment awarded to women who are overtly assertive, aggressive, or high achievers. That is because in these cultures, the primary role of a woman is to be a supportive wife and mother.
Having been indoctrinated in a culture that held these values, I endured a long struggle as an adult which culminated in a serious illness. I finally realized and accepted that I did not fit the stereotypical role that my culture assigned to my gender.
In such an instance, one is left with two choices - either sacrifice one's own beliefs and values for those of society; or forego conforming to society's expectations, and be true to one's own beliefs and values.
Unfortunately, more often than not, most of us choose the former without even realizing we are doing so, or that there is even a choice. And in order to fit into our social or cultural circumstances, we make the mistake of burying who we really are in the process. We tend to sacrifice our own desires for the sake of conforming to what is culturally or socially expected of us.
The more we strive to be socially accepted, the more we bury our true nature. And as time goes on, it becomes second nature for us to bury our own sense of self in order to feel socially accepted.
When this happens, we have basically sacrificed our own individual values and needs for the group values of the society we belong to. And as this continues to happen over time, we inevitably come to a point where we begin to feel that our life has both lost meaning as well as direction, and we don't understand why.
When our life loses direction and we feel lost, what it really means is that we have lost ourselves (our sense of "self"). We have lost touch with who we truly are, because we have slowly and unconsciously been giving ourselves away. And when this happens, one of the first things we do to remedy the situation is to go searching outside for answers. We don't realize that we are actually searching for "self". So we go looking to find our answers in books, teachers, gurus, seminars, mentors, and so on, in the hope that they will have the answers. Sometimes in our quest, we end up feeling more lost because we are looking in all the wrong places. We are still looking outside for someone else to give us answers, whereas what we have lost is inside. It's our own sense of self.
It is here that I find Life Coaching at its best. A good life coach will help to uncover all the layers that "society" has inflicted upon us so that we can start to discover who we really are. This can actually be quite a magical experience, because it feels as though we are re-discovering the world through new and fresh eyes. As we start to unravel the layers to expose our authentic self - a self that is free from expectations that others have inflicted upon us - we are able to move forward in life from that space, making decisions that come from within. Every decision we make will be coming from our authentic self instead of coming from what society expects of us.
Life becomes transformed as we move forward, as decision after decision in every waking moment of our life comes from authenticity as opposed to an unrealistic external expectation inflicted upon us.
A Life Coach is not a guru or a teacher or someone who tells us what to do or how to live our life. We don't need yet another person telling us what to do or how to be. On the contrary. A Life Coach is someone who is able to recognise the strength and power we already hold within our self. Someone who can make us aware of our own uniqueness, and who has the ability to show us that we already are everything we want to be.
Anita Moorjani is a Life Coach and Marketing Director of Power One. She is also one of the founding members and the Executive Vice President of the Hong Kong International Coaching Community. She can be contacted via the Power One website at www.power-one.org.
