I will never forget a roommate of mine coming home and talking about how they were feeling stuck and overwhelmed, so they reached out to their coach for suggestions.
“Coach?”
Yeah, my life coach.
They had been set up with a life coach during their college years to help with the transitional phase of life. It was a church-funded program offered to young parishioners to support a successful launch into society.
I was floored.
I had never heard of such a thing.
This roommate also had a mentor they touched base with biweekly for spiritually related topics. I remember feeling myself drift into a unique type of FOMO. I was absolutely missing out.
Somehow, even with an extended family, siblings, parents, and the whole lot, I didn’t have the type of support system my roommate had. I had people around me, but I didn’t necessarily have people walking with me in that way.
And there is a difference.
I observed for months as trials and tribulations came and went, and the advice, clarity, and direction just seemed to pour in from all their resources. They needed career advice, they reached out to their coach, who led them to connect with this person, who was hiring, and so the story goes.
It wasn’t that life was suddenly easy for them.
It was that they weren’t carrying every question alone.
They had people to process with. People who could reflect things back. People who could help them think through the next step before they spiraled into the entire staircase.
Was this how people made it through life without feeling crushed?
At the time, I was too skeptical, too jaded, and too programmed into self-preservation to fully understand it. But the answer is yes.
The African proverb “it takes a village to raise a child” rings in my head often. We hear it when we talk about babies, families, and communities, but I think we forget that we never really stop needing a village.
We never stop being in transition.
We never stop learning.
We never stop needing support.
So why do some of us find ourselves drowning in seasons of solitude?
Maybe it’s society. Maybe it’s by choice. Maybe it’s survival. Maybe somewhere along the way, we learned that needing people made us weak, needy, difficult, or dependent.
Maybe it’s all just a bullsh*t story we tell ourselves that says, “I don’t need anyone.”
I took pride in figuring things out for myself. I had a sense of accomplishment when I survived a season of hardship. I knew how to push through. I knew how to make it work. I knew how to keep going, even when I was exhausted.
And for a while, I thought that was strength.
What I didn’t realize was how much I could have learned through those seasons with the right kind of support. Not support that fixed everything for me. Not support that told me exactly what to do. But support that helped me slow down enough to hear myself.
I think about the potential of my decisions if I had someone reflect them back to me in a way that helped me feel whether it was truly a decision I wanted to make.
I think about how many times I mistook urgency for clarity.
How many times I chose the thing that made sense on paper, but didn’t feel aligned in my body.
How many times I needed someone to ask one better question.
That is the part of coaching I don’t think people always understand.
Coaching is not about having someone else take over your life. It is not about being told what to eat, how to live, or who you should become. It is not about someone standing above you with all the answers.
At its best, coaching is a supportive space where you can pause, sort through the noise, and reconnect with your own clarity.
It is someone helping you look at what is happening in your real life, not your imagined perfect life. Your actual schedule. Your actual stress. Your actual habits. Your actual energy. Your actual needs.
It took several years for me to personally experience the unique kind of support coaching can offer.
Therapy and Coaching Offer Different Kinds of Support
Therapy is one thing. Therapy can help us explore the core of behavioral and emotional patterns, bring light to them, and prepare us to move forward.
Coaching offers something different.
Coaching helps you take the first step, then the next, and then the next.
It is real support in real time.
It is having someone hold space for your goals, your habits, your stuck places, and your follow-through. Someone who can help you notice what is working, what is not working, and what needs to change in a way that actually fits your life.
Because sometimes the issue is not that we don’t know anything.
Sometimes we know too much.
We have the podcasts, the articles, the meal plans, the saved posts, the books, the advice, the opinions, and the endless list of things we “should” be doing.
But information is not the same as support.
And knowing what to do is not always the same as being able to do it.
This is where coaching becomes real.
It helps turn all of that information into something personal, practical, and possible. It gives you a place to be honest about what is actually getting in the way. It helps you build awareness, not shame. It helps you take action without abandoning yourself in the process.
Looking back, I don’t think I was jealous of my roommate because they had a coach.
I think I was grieving the fact that I had spent so much of my life believing I had to figure everything out alone.
Now I know better.
We are not meant to survive every transition by white-knuckling our way through it. We are not meant to carry every decision, every habit change, every healing season, and every unknown by ourselves.
Sometimes we don’t need more pressure.
We need support.
We need clarity.
We need someone who can help us remember that we were never meant to do all of this alone.
If you’re in a season where support would help, coaching can be a place to slow down, sort through the noise, and take the next right step.