I remember an evening in January, entering a dining room filled with women.  I felt my insides chatter and not just from the cold.  I was the only Asian from Asia and had just traveled 15 hours to be there.

It was the start of life coaching school, the Courageous Living Coaching Certification (formerly known as the Courageous Coaching Training Program).

This month, we had our last class.  I had submitted my final portfolio requirements and I’m FINALLY completing my required number of coaching hours.

I learned a lot this past year.  I learned how to be a coach, to hold the space for the client and allow her inner wisdom to come through.  I discovered the tools to ground a session and to work with the client through the shifts  she wanted in her life.  I was taught how to set up a business and was guided how to market myself as a life coach.

But the lessons I learned about myself as a human being were as important as the lessons on dealing with fear and working with the shadow:

Sometimes all you have to do is show up.

Life coach training is not easy.  It was inconvenient to have class at 1:30 in the morning, to coach a client after a long day at work, to make time for homework, to read pages of a book and work through exercises.

When you just show up, your curiosity about what you do drives you forward and you find yourself engaged, stimulated and motivated to continue.  You find yourself forgetting your tiredness, sleepiness and random excuses. You are driven by your curiosity, your desire to learn, to do something new, to be better than you were before.

Showing up is the first step.  Just read the first page, just dial the number, just sign up for a WordPress account.  You might find yourself 10 months later with a business.

Tell people what you do.

When you’re doing something so close to your heart, it feels very vulnerable to share.  I had a hard time telling people I was training to be a life coach.  I didn’t feel qualified and I wasn’t sure if people would find it weird.

I started telling a few friends.  Then I started telling their friends and then moved on to telling complete strangers.  At first I was motivated by contributing something more interesting to the conversation.  Then I realized people did find it fascinating and some were even moved to ask how they could become clients.

Yes, it’s a vulnerable place.  Saying it out loud will feel scary…but it will also allow you to be more comfortable with this new idea about yourself and even lead you to find clients—and maybe even create a business.

Be open.

There were books I had to read that I would never have picked up from the bookshelf.

There were people I had to reach out to that I would have been too shy to approach.

There were exercises that I had to do (shadow work, laugh sessions, coaching live in front of my classmates, showing up for my mastermind calls) that were pretty uncomfortable.

I told myself to be open, to go with whatever experience life coaching school had for me.  There was some resistance, I won’t lie, but I allowed myself to be curious about what the resistance was trying to tell me.  (Mostly, it had to with my story about wanting to be “qualified” first before I could be an effective coach.)

The openness led me to beautifully-written passages, shifts in my thinking, connections with new friends.

Try to be open, despite the resistance.  You don’t know where this can lead.

It’s not about you.  It’s about your client.

Are you even qualified to coach?  You have your own issues; how can you even coach others?  You don’t understand what they’re going through.  Who says you can even help them?

These were some of the words my inner critic had for me.

I could choose to stay in this place of believing this about myself.  But early on, I decided to focus my attention on my client, to take myself out of the picture and to serve her to the best of my ability.  When I did that, I found myself connecting with her and feeling myself move into a space of creativity and trust rather than fear and criticism.

Take your eyes off yourself.  Shift your attention to someone else.  You will find the inner critic voices fade.

The amazing women of the 2015 Courageous Coaching Training Program

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