i've offered free coaching to multiple friends, on multiple occasions helped friends cry about wounds involving their parents they hadn't been able to access themselves, on one occasion helped a friend deal with acute pain using IFS
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it's not a substitute for the friendship it's just a different thing we can do within the friendship. i explicitly put myself away temporarily in order to make more room for them, then i come back
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sounds like you maybe don't believe that coaching can be very good, or like it consists of telling other people what to do / think / feel? that's not how my coaching style works at all. the whole thing is about making room for what the client / friend already thinks / feels
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yeah, ime there’s not quite enough room in ordinary conversation to do the stuff i and other coach friends of mine can do in coaching, at least not deliberately. it can happen spontaneously which is great but coaching can be laser-targeted and much faster
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when i adopt the coaching frame i release the other person from having to care about entertaining me in the conversation; they can be much more selfish about attending exclusively to their own experience and i can provide scaffolding for that
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beautifully put and thank you for doing this for people i am sure you have done much good
last question: is it really that ordinary conversation does not allow for this? or is there some other inhibiting factor?
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I ask because I, too, occasionally set myself aside, make space for my interlocutor and occasionally helpful words may even come out of my mouth, but in any case my friends feel heard and seem to achieve some kind of resolution.
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Personally I just regard it as a normal part of friendship, but perhaps this is only because I don't have the same vocabulary you do
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yeah i mean that sounds great. personally i’ve never had friends who could do this for me to the extent that anything actually changed for me. there were specific skills i was missing (mostly learning how to actually feel my feelings) that no friends were aware i was missing
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and that i had to go into coaching worlds and related worlds (mostly circling) to acquire. maybe it didn’t have to be like that but that’s what saved my life, personally