Inception, or how to understand coaching

*this article was first published in the Romanian leadership magazine Cariere, here;

I recently re-watched Inception, the movie, and found a few striking parallels with life, and with the beginning of this year. The main idea of the movie is that of a dream within a dream. What this means is that the more you go deeper in the depths of a dream, the more you make the time expand and go slower and slower.

It’s quite the same with passions, actually. And with almost every new thing we learn. The more we go deeper and wish understand faster, the more space and time we will need to dedicate.

At the end of February we began the first edition of the International Coach Academy in Bucharest, a coaching school that can help you become an accredited coach in less than one year. As the course started, I immediately began to recognize myself in my students. It’s as if I’d re-live my life again, but from a different perspective.

For example, I remember very well that at the beginning, when I barely understood what coaching means, I used to have a lot of uncertainties and I felt it hard to detach myself. I wanted to find out all the answers, but I could dedicate neither space, nor time to receive them.

Now, as I juggle with the roles of facilitator, mentor and coach, my challenge is to resist my wish to reveal the road. It’s not about my road anymore. My role now is to guide the other and work with his lack of clarity, slowly showing him elements that will help him build his own map and dream. This way I realized that at the beginning I was rushing. What I really needed was to let myself loose and be guided towards the things from within me that I did not have enough abilities to reach. I needed to give myself the permission of not knowing.

Because the truth is that when you start practicing coaching it is impossible to know everything from the very beginning. You need a transformation, a change and multiple levels of knowledge.

One of the most difficult paradigms had to change was to understand that I need to set myself objectives that come from within me, inspired by my wishes, dreams and passions. Objectives like money, a house, a car, aren’t true if they can’t help me reach my real objectives.

This is how I got to the point where I understood that I needed to listen not by searching for the answers I waited to find, but by being open to anything that comes up in my way. If I don’t hear any answers, it means that I only listen to myself, being stuck in the reality I’m already accustomed to.

It is exactly the story of the young hero who barely knows what he is capable of, but wants at all costs to win the battle. Yet, on his way, he’ll bump into many obstacles that will show him his true self. All these things will also bring him many fears: the fear that he’s not strong enough, that he might not be appropriate for his mission, that he will get stuck. But it’s really this challenges that will help him go further.

Most heroes win when they realize they cannot control everything and end up relying on external help: their guide, signs that pop out in their way. Eventually they let things unfold and gain the confidence that the road they’re on, no matter how it looks, is the right way for them.

It’s the same with each of us. Not because this path that you are on right know has something special, but because you, walking on it, can be yourself, know your energy and understand your emotions.

As part of this road, it is OK to go though several states and frustrations, when you wish to understand everything from the very start. The end of innocence always brings life in a point where you can finally see it from a different perspective. As David Whyte, the renowned English poet says in one of his poems:

You were more marvelous in your simple wish to find a way than any gilded destination you could reach.