How to Coach a Woman
I run a life coaching company. I’m a feminist coach. I’m a woman.
Women are important. Women are complex. Women are vessels of incredible power and capacity. Yet for women, claiming power and filling capacity is incredibly challenging. Women are a minority population. Women do not enjoy the same rights and freedoms as men. Minority status is dictated by history and culture. It was not that long ago that women were considered chattel, something like cattle, subhuman property, and in many parts of the world women still endure a subhuman designation.
As a coach: you cannot ignore or discount the role that history and culture plays in the life of your female client.
She has been raised in a world that has told her since she was a child that she shouldn’t be too loud, that she should probably like pink, and that her worth as a human coincides with a separate designation as a desirable sex object. She has been taught that she can be whatever she wants to be, but she will make less than her male counterparts and she will still be responsible for care-taking and balancing the needs of everyone around her against her own.
She was taught she should be afraid of men and that they are also her protectors. She was taught that her sexuality has an expiration date, but that it is undesirable to express it. She was taught to form cliques, to pit herself against other women, to deconstruct other women with her eyes and measure body parts as commodities inducing jealousy and shame.
She has been taught that her status as single or partnered says something about her own self worth. She has been told that having an emotional life signals weakness. If she is curvy, or a woman of color she has been othered, treated as invisible and has been led to believe that she is not only less attractive than other women, but that she is actually worth less as a human.
Women are taught that they can be controlled. In the United States of America a woman is beaten every three minutes. One in three woman has been raped. Look around any room where there are women and let that sink in.
If you are having a hard time with my assessment then it’s time to turn the mirror inward.
Pull out each strand above and think about it in the context of your own life. It’s a personal journey to move towards an understanding of intersectionality; which means taking a look at race, class, and gender as they apply to an individual. Seek to understand each overlapping system in terms of discrimination or disadvantage. It takes time. It takes bravery. It feels terrible at times and yes, there is grief involved.
To coach in this way is a calling. It requires you to get into the fight and help correct the unfairly imposed imbalances of the world. Women often need someone to help strategize because their burden is heavy. Coaches are the perfect contenders to fill that void.
As a coach, you don’t need to have conquered your own demons, or to have reached a Jedi like stage of enlightenment. You just need to be able to hold down space like a champ and have a solid grasp on your own issues and hang-ups so that you can be sure your unfinished work doesn’t bleed into the coaching conversation.
You also need to believe that women are worthy of power. This is a journey in and of itself, especially as a woman. We have ALL been socialized to believe that a woman is less than. We ALL have work to do in changing that internal narrative and external script.
What does it look like for a woman to live in her power? In a perfect world she would wake up in the morning and know that her body has filled it’s natural shape and proportions according to the outlines of her ancestors. She would look in the mirror and smile, noting that her nose and hips and skin tone are perfect and beautiful and reflective of all those came before her. Her features have been passed down by the strongest survivors of her line.
She will go about her day as an equal in house work, childcare, and career. She will not measure her body against other women; she will celebrate the kinship and bond with every greeting. She will have constructed her life in a way that matches her talents and passions and she will experience flow as she uses her mind to create and live out her vocation.
She will live in an environment that is free of violence, emotional abuse, and discomfort. She will have control over her own impulses and words and foster a world where harmful patterns are broken and replaced with loving acceptance.
She will revel in her sexuality, shimmering and enjoying every facet of her body well into old age, until death.
The path to actualizing this vision is strewn with blood and tears. It’s a long, arduous process. It begins with the self and it begins with the body. It begins with learning about and dismantling all of the limiting beliefs that hang like weights on our souls. The process of dismantling old beliefs can feel very scary for there is then open space that needs to be filled with new beliefs. Many women are not used to choosing for themselves and the process of choosing can be both exhilarating and wrenching.
Start with the internal work and then gently move to action.
Action represents concrete steps and movement away from behaviors, people, situations, and environments that are oppressive and unhealthy. Action is a big deal. It requires risk and bravery.
You can root for your clients, you can believe in your clients, but you cannot will your clients to make change. Many people prefer to stay in the heady phase of things and are slow to action because truth often disrupts some pretty big apple carts. As a coach you cannot force action. Sometimes situations fester, sometimes they are never resolved. Sometimes it takes years for a single spark of awareness to turn into a brush fire that brings waves of change and transformation. Hold the space, hold your breath, believe in the woman.
Coaching in this way means you believe in your client. You trust her to be the steward of her own life, even if she chooses and moves in ways that you might not have chosen. Believing in your client means you hear her and you quite literally believe her when she tells you what she has experienced or how she feels. She is the expert on her own life and the author of her own existence.
Believing in your client means you give her permission to be the author, pilot, and ship captain. It means you hold an umbrella to protect her from drops of shame and doubt as she sorts through all of the Legos that she dumped on the floor. It means you let her build with them, you celebrate the process of building, and you celebrate if she wants to smash her creation and move on.
A woman who has been given space to heal, permission to grow, and time to strategize will naturally step into her power regardless of age, shape, size, color, creed, orientation, occupation and place in life. As a coach it has been one of the greatest honors of my life to help facilitate this process of transformation and rebirth. I hope you will consider coaching women to step into their power. It is sacred work.
To apply for the Catalyst Coaching Intensive, gain an evidence based approach to coaching, and be trained by Noelle, head here.
