Hey Coach!

I know sometimes my entries are WORDY. Sometimes I even try to fight it. If you read my "excerpts" Email, it was my side of misadventures surrounding me possibly working with a professional coach for a short time (about 3 months) to discuss some possible career moves that I am considering. The guy that I was in contact with, Christopher, is in an intern program, which made me think of some pompous punk big-timing me because every time I tried to reach this guy by telephone he would kind of act snobby and tell me that he couldn't talk to me. This happens to me a lot, because if someone tells me "I need to talk to you at 10 AM", it will probably be 10:05 at the earliest. It's just the way my schedule is.

So, I called this guy (as I allude to in my blog entry) to cancel, and told him "I think our schedules are incompatible." I chickened out from telling him that he was a pompous ass, because those people never take that to heart-they just see it as a deficiency in the person telling them. Well, during the conversation, he told me what he does for a living, and I realize that he bills by the hour (he's a licensed therapist, not a male hooker), and that he was just working me into his schedule--so I feel like a jerk for being so hard on him about his schedule-driven-ness. He tipped me off to his age by telling me (10 times at least) that he has 25 years experience in his field--he's at least in his 50's--also tipped me off that he doesn't really "use" Email...and wanted me to fax a bunch of shit to him.

I'm sure by this point you're sure that I ended the coaching, right? Nope.

And this isn't one of those "penance" projects that Fran always accuses me of. She gives me a hard time if I'm reading Russian literature or something else that is laborious (Melville, Cooper, etc.)--she says that's from my "penance" reading list to pay for all the Stephen King novels I read when I was younger...So I'm not sticking with this guy to pay for nerds of the world (funny joke that just came to mind: dyslexics of the world: untie!) that I've wronged.

What happened is this: I kind of want to go through the coaching process, and he really seems to have a good blueprint for that. Have you ever seen a football coach? Coming from Dallas, our best example is Bill Parcells--that tub of lard looks like the Michelin man! He can't go out and play--the best way to get him to do a situp is to put a jelly doughnut between his feet. But he knows how to motivate and his job is to analyze game film and deliver observations. No, I'm not rationalizing because I'm too much of a wimp to cut the guy loose--I'm rationalizing because, as I talked with this guy, he seemed to follow me with what my possible routes of career are. I'm not looking for a guru to provide some kind of astounding insight--as far as I'm concerned, I'm the guru! I don't expect anyone to know as much about my goals and expectations as me...

It's also kinda funny--I was talking about this coach to my friend, Mike D.--he was just soaking it up, mocking me for getting a coach and really giving me a hard time about it. "Other Mike" is very independent and would really have a hard time submitting to the scrutiny of another person. He really makes fun of my constant goal-setting process because he thinks it is a wasteful, laborious process whereas he just goes along, quite successfully, but perhaps practicing a little bit of revisionist history (ie. "Well, I'm here, aren't I? So I guess the was the plan all along was for me to get here..."). He was quizzing me pretty hard about the coaching process, and I just laughed, because if you can't buy into the fact that goal-setting is productive, then improving your goal-setting through coaching won't make sense, either. Eventually I just smiled very big and said "One of my goals is to find better friends!" This cracked him up and he stopped.

It's kind of like when I was in Sunday school one time--a girl who is an electrical engineer and very smart was talking about a conversation she had with an atheist. She was telling us how she showed him what the Bible says about creation, etc. and she was using the Bible to refute the theory of evolution. HELLO! I corrected her and said that her assumption that the Bible is irrefutable isn't accepted by an atheist, so you are not able to use it as supporting documentation in an argument (circular argument). Dazed looks. Then they took up a petition to get me out of that Sunday school...just kidding.

The point is, I think the coaching process is really to ask more refined questions about the direction you are going. My coach was somewhat unprepared (I later saw a version of the exercise that we were supposed to be going through, and he had really bungled it, but in a rather interesting way), and self-centered, but that can happen to the best of us...However, when going through the exercises that he proposed, which was to assess your career and the efficiency to which your self-determined skill set is being used, I think I got something out of that.

I told him I would continue on...and say 10 Hail Mary's.