The story of how I came to be a life coach is really a story of my journey to embrace my purpose to be a healer. That is what my life coaching is: the art and practice of healing.
In 2009, I experienced what I now know to be one of the most difficult and painful years of my life. During this year, I ended communication with my parents and sister (which would last for five years), grieved the loss of three family members including my abuelita (grandmother), experienced the end of two major friendships, and lived long-distance from my partner for four months while much of this was occurring. The shock, pain, loneliness, and grief were overwhelming.
In the aftermath of that year, when my partner and I returned to Austin, TX (where we lived at the time), I started exploring and reviving my spiritual life and practices, which had become dormant in the seven years since I had come out as queer. I rekindled spiritual practices from my childhood, and began a sustained exploration of and learning about various spiritual traditions and their ways of connecting with the Divine. This was a much-needed balm to my heart and soul.
Simultaneous to these events, I was pursuing my Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. By this time, I had completed a pilot study for what would become my dissertation research, which was an investigation to understand the social context, consequences, and assigned meanings of the pain experienced by queer-identified Latinxs.
In the process of sitting with and bearing witness to people’s stories of pain, many of my research participants confided that the mere experience of telling their story was healing. The sharing of their hurt and trauma, bringing it out of the shadows, into an affirming and nonjudgmental space was helpful at the least and transformative at its best. What started out a means to an end—research to earn my Ph.D.—ultimately revealed itself to be a talent and skill: the ability to be present with people in their pain, no matter how great or small, to help them acknowledge, experience, and journey through it.
Between my deepening understanding of and connection to the Divine and the completion of my Ph.D., a calling and purpose had been revealed in my life: I was meant to heal myself and be a healer. And for me, healing has come to be about growing and cultivating a sense of wholeness through balance. Collecting all the pieces, not forcing them to fit, but to understand their place in the whole.
The question remained, however, what kind of healer?
I could return to school, yet again, and receive training to become a therapist or counselor, but this path never seemed right for me. I was neither interested in nor felt called to specifically work in a clinical setting, addressing various kinds of psychological, emotional, and mood disorders.
Rather, I am interested in working with people to heal the everyday kinds of pain, hurt, chaos, disruption, and imbalance that are rife in the human experience. Much of which, as my research and training can attest, can be traced back to the many forms of inequality and injustice that are rampant in our world.
Being a life coach who is a sociologist prepares me to not just see the individual, but understand the interplay between a person and their social context, which then informs the tools, reflections, and strategies I share with clients. Life coaching appeals to me because it is the ideal vehicle for doing the healing work I am called to do: to work with individuals and organizations to address and resolve the various everyday forms of pain and dysfunction that hinder their lives and work.
There is a freedom in life coaching.
It allows me to combine all my strengths, skills, and learning to provide individually focused, socially aware, and spiritually informed encouragement, motivation, guidance, and loving accountability within a structured and practical setting. I am drawn to coaching because I can work with individual people but also conduct healing work within group and organizational settings. My training in sociology and attentiveness to social dynamics prepares me well, and makes me especially interested, in doing this kind of coaching and healing work.
Ultimately, my experience and training have shown me that you cannot benefit the individual without being attentive to the social environment, and you cannot transform social conditions without facilitating individual change and growth. Thus, life coaching allows me to operate as a healer on these many levels, so I can adjust adjust the scope and depth of my work to address the specific goals and circumstances of a given client.