Define Yourself With Confidence

As a trainer of coaches I often teach my students to move beyond the skill of coaching into the skill of self-trusting. Having great mastery of a specific skill is important, but without self-mastery all we become are manipulators of open-ended questions. Coaching is much more than that.

One of the most important aspects of being a success in any career, but especially in an emerging career such as coaching, is the ability to "know thyself" without question or fear. It is vital that you trust yourself as you define yourself as a coach, whether this entails defining a particular niche or being a generalist.

Perhaps, like me, you have never had to represent yourself to the world on your own terms. My previous careers led me to the structured Business place most people find themselves in: that nine-to-five venue with a boss, an HR department and all those things and people who tell you what to do and help create your identity for you. I was happy to leave all that behind to begin my work as a Spiritual Coach. Yet, I had some unsettling questions about this new life that kept me hidden under the sheets: Who was I now? And how would I get people to buy into spirituality as a means of fully accessing their own power and truth? Henceforth, whatever the world was going to know of me would depend on how I thought of and defined myself.

I completed my coaching training many years ago when coaching was still new and practically unheard of. With my mixed cultural heritage -African- and Native-American, and my chosen coaching niche - spiritual coaching, I managed to triple the population wherever I went within the coaching community. There were few African-American coaches, no Native-American ones, and even fewer spiritual coaches that I could discover. Alone and scared, I trusted little of what I knew to be true of myself and my abilities.

As a student back then I listened to all the dos and don'ts of coaching, tested my skills on my willing clients, poor things, but still remained frightened to death. My fear lay not in my ability as a coach - I was confident that my skill would grow - but in my ability to attract people to my niche. I am a spiritual coach. My passion for growing the adult to spiritual and emotional maturity is all consuming. Yet, at that time, I had little faith that anyone would value this kind of coaching. I certainly had not seen it modeled in any of the courses I had taken, and so I deferred to others to define for me what I should offer my clients.

I leaned heavily on other coaches' opinions of the value of spirituality in coaching. When I would sheepishly mumble, "What do you think of spirituality in coaching?" their replies would always amount to some version of: "It's great, just don't use the 'S' word. Don't be too woo-woo or touchy-feely, Business people don't like that." Some would reply, "I bring spirituality into my coaching but I would never call it that." Great!, I thought. Still too scared to challenge their opinions, my coaching practice and I suffered like a pre-pubescent girl - underdeveloped and straining to bloom. By being unwilling to take the risk of naming myself, I not only sold out myself but, ultimately, the clients whom I could have assisted.

For two years I allowed mind chatter to keep me in limbo. I had abandoned my own inner compass for gauging my truth while hiding my natural abilities. I relied on others to invalidate what I knew to be a valid and worthwhile offering.

Trying to hide that I was a spiritual coach was like trying to hide my I was a Black woman. I was only kidding myself. Finally, the Universe had had enough of my bellyaching. As I prayed about it one evening, I heard the smallest of voices saying very clearly, "Fine, we'll find someone else to do it!" Well, that just pissed me off! How dare s/he pull the ultimate coaching tactic - "the take away" - on me?

That evening I called my friends and told them boldly to announce myself as a spiritual coach, and off I went. The very next day I got Business cards with the title "S