The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
                                                                                     – Albert Camus

​Ever since I was a child, I’ve had a deep-down feeling that there is something I am meant to be, to do, to become that aligns deeply with who I really am and what my true purpose is.

For most of my life, I couldn’t articulate this – it was operating at a gut level, not a conscious level. I could sense it, but I couldn’t put it into thoughts or words. And the feeling that often manifested wasn’t uplifting or aspirational. What I felt most was a general sense of unease.

For the most part, the people around me at any given point didn’t know how to support me in understanding what I was experiencing and living into who I was meant to be. The unease I experienced was the clash between what I felt on the inside and what the world around me presented me with.

​As a kid growing up in a working-class family where few people around me had gone to college or been exposed to the bigger world (besides the military), entire ways of being, not to mention professions, were just totally off the radar. They simply didn’t exist, and I had no idea they were out there, let alone possible for me.

More recently, as a social justice organizer, I’ve encountered environments that tried to tell me who I am and how I should act as a white person, a man, or any of the myriad other social identities I can claim, while having little interest in understanding me in my fullness and complexity, meeting me where I am, and helping me connect to my higher self.
 
In these moments, not knowing what else to do, I tried to deal with this unease by going along with my environment – adopting the ways of being, thinking and acting of those around me in order to fit in and belong. I joined the Marines. I tried to “be a man.” I acted out the “good white person.” Yet it never worked. While this path led to some insights and learning, it always ended in suffering, and in some cases to depression and addiction. Why?

Because I was still divided from my true self.
 
Yet looking back, something else became clear. It has been in the depths of despair and struggle that I’ve also made the biggest steps forward in my life. What was it that helped me grow?
 
I’ve come to identify three key factors – factors that are essential to coaching:
 
First, I came into relationship with a person or community who could see the real me, who called that "real me" forth, who demonstrated that it was possible and invited me into becoming that bigger, expanded version of myself.
 
Second, I was challenged to discover and exercise new levels of internal personal power that I didn’t know existed, and that I didn’t realize were at my disposal. That helped me realize just how much I was giving my internally-sourced power away to my environment, allowing it to define me and how I acted.
 
And third, the more I got in touch with my own internal power and sense of who I really am, the more it unleashed my creative energy into the world, spiraling into new relationships and possibilities.
 
In other words, I got into relationship with people who knew another way was possible, who loved me, and who wouldn’t buy my usual crap. They helped me expand my sense of internal power. And this propelled me take action in the world.
 
This is the essence of coaching, and is why this work is my calling.