image by are you my rik?

Last week Victoria and I got our life coach, Maia Conty, on the phone to discuss her approach to coaching. We learned a great deal about what coaching is, how it differs from therapy, and how this coach sees her role in helping to create the future.

Maia first came to coaching about three and a half years ago, when she was invited as a guest to a training session. “I was painting with an all-female painting crew and I was up there on top of this really high ladder with a sander and a mask and it was hot as all heck and I’m up there with the sun and all this paint dust ... and I was going, what am I doing here? ... It wasn’t too long after that I was invited as a guest to one of these coaching sessions.”

“As an undergraduate, I had studied psychology ... and had been very disappointed ... I had wanted to work with people in an inspiring way to create life, and I found that the psychology degree ... felt kind of dreary to me… But when I was sitting in this life coaching session as a guest, I said Oh my gosh—this was what I was looking for. This was a dynamic engagement with a human being in the process of creating its life.”

The specific style of coaching Maia practices is called Accomplishment Coaching, based on ontology, or the study of the nature of being. “The school of life coaching I was trained in comes from an ontological inquiry. What does it mean to be a human being? How do we expand our being? And how does who we are being shape reality? ... In the life coaching practice we engage in both being and doing. We shift who we’re being—open and expand and shine the light on and cultivate and develop who we’re being—and in that we can start to see what we’re capable of doing and the kinds of stuff we can imagine ourselves doing.”

Her training was a rigorous, hands-on, year-long program, with monthly weekend intensives as well as group calls, reading, and working with her own coach to experience coaching and develop her own being. “It was really incredible, and at times, very challenging to dismantle stuff that was there in my way. Part of the commitment was that over the year, not only were you learning to become a life coach and learning a whole array of tools to use ... but you would undergo a massive transformation yourself.”

The tools she learned are powerful, but they are not the most important part of the conversation. They’re used in service to the goal, which is to support the client in the fulfillment of her mission, “especially to manage and get the stuff that’s in your way, out of the way. On the journey, a boulder might fall into your path, so you may need some rock-climbing gear to get over it. But the tools are there as a help to the goal of expanding and engaging in life.”

I’ve experienced many of the tools Maia’s talking about here. There’s the well-being tracking sheet that Victoria talked about yesterday, to remind us of the things we need to take care of for ourselves. There’s the clearing exercise, to help us get out of icky patterns of thought and see things more clearly, and lots more.

Then there’s what is, I think, the most powerful tool in the arsenal, which is helping the client distinguish between her essence, the “natural unique authentic expression of yourself ... that you came in with as a little baby,” and her survival mechanism, which includes all the “limited ways of being that we’ve taken on over time.” Clearly being able to see which part of ourselves we are acting from helps us to get “out from underneath our gunk and get in touch with our glory.”

One thing I’ve noticed in being coached by Maia is that, although we’ve been friends for many years and have spent hundreds of hours talking to each other, our coaching conversations are very different. This has a lot to do with the training she’s had. “Just like a therapist is trained in holding certain distinctions, coaches are, too ... They have to do with being responsible and at-cause in your life versus being a victim or at the effect of your life… We might have a habit of getting hung up or interpreting what’s going on now in terms of the past… The distinction I hold is to interpret what’s going on in the moment in the context of the future we are creating.”

Maia treasures her ability to engage with her clients in partnership, supporting and assisting them in building the lives they want. “I get to work with people who want to engage with their lives! ... It’s my experience that people who are looking to expand their relationship to life and bring purpose and take on creating vision and get through hurdles and create satisfaction and joy bring a certain amount of reverence to what they believe life can be ... That life can be much more than just the way we end up surviving.”

“Even though it looks like we’re not [just] surviving because we have toaster ovens and Cuisinarts and we can flick on the heat and the lights, very different from survival a hundred years ago ... [there’s still this] ingrained way where we just survive life. And then I have to get up and go to work and then that happens and then 10 years pass and then that happens and 20 years pass and then I have a health thing ... just rolling along with the way life shows up. Versus this urge, this sense that people come to coaching with, which is I’m looking to create another experience of life.”

Her hope is that, through coaching and other means, more and more of us can learn to see right now as a seed from which the future is growing. “Here we are, we’re evolving, consciousness is evolving, and we can see that happen in a number of places. Therapy is the first evolution into looking at our thoughts, thinking about our thoughts. My feeling is that now life coaching as I practice it is the further evolution of that, in which we get to be freed up in a clear and concrete way from our neuroses, hangups, and limitations. We orient ourselves from what we’re capable of and use that new sense of self—whole, complete, filled with creative capabilities—in the services of creating the future.”

“Life coaching is a support for our leap into that. Maybe our children or our children’s children will think it’s funny and silly that we needed this [support], because these ideas of ... creating our lives will just be so status quo.”

I love imagining a world where people decide consciously and in community with other people the kind of lives they want to live and the kind of world they want to live them in. To me, this is the entire point of working on myself—so that I’m able to engage in that creation without being held back by old beliefs and traumas. We have so much more agency than we think we do! Waking up to this is what the coaching process, and the process of personal development, is all about.