Coaching: A Journey Within
Five years ago, a mentor of mine – someone who shaped my corporate journey – met with a road accident and left for his heavenly abode. It took the company five days to hire his replacement. He remains in my heart, and that, I’ve come to believe, is his true legacy. It is also where my road to ICF certification truly begins.
Today, having reached a point where corporate life had become a 9-to-7 routine of monotonous ups and downs, I started questioning myself. The limitation was pain; the value was in being of worth to someone. Could I wish for more? One day, scrolling through LinkedIn, an ad about coaching caught my eye. It felt like a space I could walk into with confidence – a path toward fulfilling my aspiration to be of value to everyone around me. A couple of sessions in, once I understood its relevance to my own life’s journey, I decided to give it a real shot.
What I didn’t realize when I began my ICF accredited coach training was that coaching would turn out to be less a path to helping others and more a journey inward. I’d long played the role of helping my team navigate life’s challenges – hearing problems over the water cooler, understanding them better over evening coffee, and dispensing a “prescribed remedy” by the next afternoon. It was practically routine. With hierarchy in play and team members often deferential, I hadn’t realized that one size never really fits all. You can be deeply well-meaning and still be ineffective at the same time. A few lessons I’ve learned so far on this journey:
- Reflect on who you truly are. You’ll find a story more surprising than any fiction you’ve encountered. Being a non-judgmental observer is hard, but it may be the closest you’ll ever get to your true self.
- Be gentle with yourself. Just as you accept others’ imperfections and mistakes, learn to accept your own. Our deepest flaws often trace back to the moments we forgot to forgive someone – most of all, ourselves.
- You can be a good teacher and a good student at once. Each role completes the other – the strength of one comes from your capacity in the other. Being questioned and challenged often draws out the best and most creative part of us, and so does curiosity. The path to ICF certification teaches this early: a monologue is simply the pouring out of a lesson already learned; a dialogue is stronger – both sides learn at twice the pace, until the line between master and student quietly disappears.
- Never look down on anyone, and never look up to anyone. Every journey is golden and inspiring in its own right. A friend once told me of a scene he witnessed on a street in Benares – two literary figures debating the author of a short story, both confidently wrong, until an auto-rickshaw driver corrected them. The two writers stood amazed, and humbled.
What I see today is this: coaching, like life, is a never-ending journey. A life coach certificate marks a milestone, not an arrival. The curves we hit aren’t just points of inflection – they’re points of reflection. Just when we think we’ve arrived, a quiet voice asks: did we ever really begin? Life often feels like walking on a treadmill – the sensation of movement paired with the nagging feeling of going nowhere. And yet, whether it’s the body or the soul being exercised, what gets built happens within, invisible to the world, even as the self quietly replenishes.
And perhaps that’s the real lesson. Neither my mentor, Mr. Sanjay, nor that unlettered rickshaw driver in Benares ever needed a title to be effective. They simply did, quietly, what needed to be done.
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Regards,
Pradeep
