I remember feeling myself bristle when someone said this about hiring a coach:
“Make sure you hire someone who has already done what you want to do. Otherwise, they’re not qualified.”
I hear the wisdom in that.
If I was having brain surgery, I’d definitely want a brain surgeon to do my operation.
If I was climbing Everest, I’d seek out guidance from someone who’d already been up the mountain and lived to tell the tale.
But it’s easy to take this idea too far, which is where my inner Mama Bear comes out on behalf of all the beautiful coaches, practitioners, artists and changemakers I know who torture themselves over it.
They start thinking:
“How can I help someone else find a loving relationship when I just got divorced?”
“How can I support people to move past their visibility fears when I still get the wobbles every time I push send?”
“Who am I to help someone else when I don’t have it all figured out?”
That is the perfect setup for a bad case of Imposter Syndrome.
It fuels the belief that before you’re qualified to help anyone, you must first become a flawless example of the thing you’re teaching.
Ha. Good luck with that one.
One of my early mentors described it like this:
You can be a second-grader taking a kindergartener by the hand. You don’t need a PhD and twenty years of experience to help someone. You just need to know something useful about the next few steps.
In fact, sometimes they’re uniquely qualified because they’re still so close to the journey. They remember what it felt like. Viscerally.
And thank goodness for that!
Because Scott Walker (the Happiness Bandit) and I are about to lead a search party for happiness.
Not because I’ve suddenly become an enlightened dragon guru. The two of us don’t spend our lives frolicking non-stop through fields of unbridled joy.
We certainly haven’t figured this whole life thing out.
Scott and I are qualified for this conversation because we’re human. We’ve spent years exploring happiness, experimenting, losing it, finding it again, and getting curious about where it really comes from.
We’re fellow explorers. We’ve gathered a few clues, and we’ll investigate alongside you.
The Happy Hour (Hour)
Sixty minutes of shenanigans, insights and happiness
Date: Thursday June 25th
Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 6pm BST
Together, we’ll follow the clues and discover the thief who’s been secretly hijacking your happiness.
There will probably definitely also be dragons and a rubber chicken.
Join the investigation here: https://www.theawakenedbusiness.com/hhh
Yours in love and play,
Steph 🐲❤️
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