Don't Persuade

As a transformational life coach, my job isn’t to be smart or give advice. It’s to uncover who my clients most want to become and stay focused on that highest version of them. The catch is that I must never try to persuade them to grow or change. The moment I persuade, I slip into the role of expert, the client stops doing their work, and the session loses its power.

The other day, a client came in despairing about how little she felt she’d accomplished in her life. She imagined herself stranded on an ocean floor, looking up at happy, successful people swimming above. I asked if she wanted to push off the bottom and join them, but she said no: she wanted to sink deeper into the dark sand.

So we did that together, feeling the deathly, lonely cold. After ten minutes, she said, “I can’t take any more,” and pictured herself swimming up to the surface. Later that day, she followed through on an important decision she’d been circling for years.

The psychoanalyst Irvin Yalom wrote, “Despair is the price one pays for self-awareness. Look deeply into life, and you’ll always find despair.” We tend to fear and feel ashamed of despair, but in truth, our despair often knows better than we do what to do next. Despair is not an enemy but an intelligence that strips away false solutions and forces us into the unknown. But to connect to that intelligence, we have to stop persuading ourselves that life is good, fair, and manageable.

I often say: feelings want to move. You don’t have to do anything about them. Whatever emotions are arising — anger, sadness, jealousy — have an energy and direction infinitely wiser than the stories you might tell about them. And if you can feel them as a felt sense, without trying to persuade yourself of anything, you’ll find that they carry you where you need to go.

This, ultimately, is the work: not to convince ourselves or anyone else to move, but to stop getting in the way of what already wants to.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, "The Blind Leading the Blind" (1568)