Dear Life Coaches: Why You Need to Remain Socially Conscious

Although I have spent almost a lifetime diving deep into the world of self-development and spirituality, I am still a newbie to this business. In fact, I am only starting my business officially within the next few weeks.

So as a newbie, I humbly ask that you take into consideration a recent awakening I had around social and political consciousness and how it relates to assisting individuals.

Individuals are not disconnected from the collective, the culture, and society they live in. In most cases, they can be almost fully defined by their contexts.

If we don’t understand this, we run the risk of treating our clients only partially. If we don’t take into consideration their levels of privilege, their gendered experience, how class has affected their outlook on life and so forth, we are leaving out a huge proportion of development and healing that could stem from understanding these contexts.

Challenging ourselves to understand socioeconomic realities will help us not to simply understand the client as a separate individual but to also treat them as people who have also been deeply affected by their environment.

This can lead to a more integrative form of life coaching rather than one that is simply working in coherence with a system of overly competitive individualism.