From the Passenger Seat: I'm Not Here to Drive Your Car

There's a sentence I find myself saying in coaching sessions almost every week.

I'm not here to drive the car. You are.

It usually comes up when a client is waiting for me to tell her what to do next. Which diet to follow. Which boundary to set. Which job to take. And I understand why she's waiting. Most of us grew up believing that the expert in the room is supposed to have the answer.

But that's not actually how change works, and it's definitely not how I coach.

A different seat

You know your life, your history, your relationships and your body better than I ever could. My job isn't to grab the wheel. It's to sit beside you.

From the passenger seat, I get a different view than you do. You're the one watching the road directly ahead, thinking about the next merge, the next exit, everything you haven't done yet. I'm the one who notices you've taken this same exit three times before. I'm the one who hears you say "I have no motivation" in the same breath as you list six things you did this week that took real discipline.

Sometimes coaching isn't about handing someone a new strategy. It's about pointing at what's already happening and asking her to look at it differently.

What this series is

From the Passenger Seat is a new series here on the blog, inspired by real conversations that happen in my coaching sessions. Details are always changed or generalised to protect client privacy, but the patterns are real, because after years of coaching women I've learned that even when our lives look completely different on the outside, the things we get stuck in are often strikingly similar.

We overthink. We take responsibility for things that were never ours to carry. We know what to do and still struggle to keep doing it. We confuse a hard day with going backwards. And sometimes we're so focused on where we think we're supposed to be that we don't notice how far we've already come.

So every so often, I'll bring you into the passenger seat with me. Not to tell you where to go. Just to offer another view of the road.

What coaching actually looks like

Something I want this series to do, more than anything else, is take some of the mystery out of coaching. So many people come to their first session with me still not sure what we're actually going to talk about, or what coaching even involves.

Recently I had the privilege of coaching a thirteen year old girl. She showed up to our first session looking genuinely terrified. She had no idea what was coming. No idea what we'd talk about, or what it would feel like to sit across from someone and be asked real questions about her life.

By the end, she was a completely different kid. That's the part people don't expect. Coaching is so much easier, and so much less intimidating, than most of us imagine before we've actually tried it. And the results, even in one conversation, can be extraordinary.

That's part of why I'm writing this series. Not just to share patterns, but to pull back the curtain a little on what coaching actually is, so it feels a little less like a mystery and a little more like something you could imagine doing yourself

Where to start

If you've ever told yourself you have no motivation while quietly doing all the hard things anyway, the first post in this series was written with you in mind.

If today's post has you nodding along and you're curious what it might look like to have someone in the passenger seat with you, you can always book a conversation. No pressure, just a chance to talk it through.

Cheers, Alison