No seriously, you have.

It might not feel like it right now, but you have all of the tools and knowledge you need to figure everything in your life out. It’s all there inside you, it’s just a case of digging it out.

I spent years working as a marketing consultant before I decided to train to be a life coach. I didn’t know what a life coach was until relatively recently, and when I first heard the concept I equated it in my mind with some kind of therapy or some new age woo woo stuff that wasn’t for me. But I live in Brighton, the woo woo capital of the UK, so I met more and more people who had a life coach and heard about their experiences, and started to meet actual life coaches and find out about what they actually did.

And I was smitten.

What I loved most about life coaching (and still do, now that I’ve become one myself) is that it wasn’t about getting someone to fix you or tell you how to live your life. It wasn’t about some guru having the answers. And (as someone who had a very negative experience of therapy as a teenager) it wasn’t about going over and over your problems and focusing endlessly on your misery. Life coaching is about you, as the client, figuring out what’s standing in your way of living your best life and putting a plan in place to get to where you want to be. All the coach does is give you useful tools, guidance and vital accountability to work it out.

You’re not broken

There is a huge industry around self-help and self-development, and a lot of it can be incredibly useful. But it’s important that you approach any book or course or online influencer with a very clear foundation in your mind – you are not broken. You do not need fixing. You do not need to be shown “the way”. There isn’t a way, anyway – what works for one person won’t necessarily work for another. How can there be one route when everyone is starting from somewhere different and heading for a different destination? No one can give you a map, they can just show you how to draw your own.

Read all the books and follow all the influencers and take all the courses that spark your interest (goodness knows I have!), but take from them the things you find useful and leave the rest. No one knows how to live your life except you. Anyone who is trying to tell you that there is something wrong with you that needs to be fixed is just trying to get money out of you by keeping you feeling in need of help.

My rule of thumb is this – if they’re trying to lift me up and empower me and fill me with joy, they’re doing something good. If they’re trying to keep me feeling small and fearful and lacking, then they have nothing to say that I want to hear.

Be your own guru

I love Danielle LaPorte, and in her latest book, White Hot Truth, which I thoroughly recommend, she says, “you are your own guru”. Which is awesome.

Everything you have been through in life – all the pain, and joy, and darkness, and light – has given you unique knowledge, skills and insight, and only you can fully understand the beautiful complexity that is your self. There is no one more qualified to guide you than you.

Sure, sometimes those insights can be hard to access. Life is a blur of responsibilities and to do lists and heartache and discovery and stress and excitement and oh-my-god-where-did-the-time-go, so of course we wander off our paths and get lost in the weeds. That’s when a coach or a self-development course can be helpful to find your way back, or to carve out a completely new road.

As a life coach, my role is to share with you the tools, resources and techniques that I have learned, along with my own life experience of facing similar struggles, and help you put them into practice.

You’re at the wheel, you’re gunning the engine, I’m just helping you plan the route.

You are your own guru.

Seriously, you’ve totally got this.

Want to know more about how life coaching can help you get clear on where you want to go and how to get there? Let’s grab a coffee.