Where is the Value?
By Jerome Dechant
April 12, 2012
These days, there are many people who label themselves as a “Life Coach,” and there is always a price tag attached to their coaching services. Most of them have the approach: do what I say, not what I do. They are often only parroting what someone else has told them, not what they’ve actually done and found to be effective or not through their own experiencing. I think it is interesting that this has become such a big business. I am certain some of the people who advertise themselves as Life Coaches don’t really have much to offer except to provide you with the opportunity to empty your pockets of your money.
In the sports world where the coach idea originated from, most often the coach for the team is someone who has spent years of his life playing the game. Some coaches become coaches because they were never quite good enough physically to compete in the sport, but they had enough practical knowledge and experience that they easily move into a coaching position. So you don’t really have to be the best athlete to be the best coach. You have to be enough of a leader and knowledgeable enough to inspire the team members to do what you tell them to. And, to the extent that what you tell them to do along with their innate abilities as athletes, as well as their ability to work together as a team, enables them to compete and win. I think it is more important how you play the game than actually winning. If you play the game, giving it your all, doing your best, you are a winner regardless of what the scoreboard says at the end of the game. I think this is true about how we live our lives as well. It is the living of life, giving it our all, and doing the best we know how to do, that makes us a winner whether we end up a billionaire or not. Ending up as a billionaire, if that’s your goal, is then just the icing on the cake, which makes it all that much more sweeter.
So, in the area of life coaching, the best ones are the ones who really know the game of life, how it is played, and what you need to do to be the best at playing this game most effectively, and they know this from their own personal experience, not just from someone else telling them or from having graduated a course at a school or university. In other words, they have been there, done that.
Personally, the best teachers are those who embody that which they teach. Actually, they don’t really “teach” anything. How they live their life is the teaching. So observing and then emulating them, we begin to embody the life experiencing which is a true learning experience in expression. It isn’t very intellectual, it is mostly experiential. Life and being are experiential. It is through experiencing life and being that we each learn most profoundly the lessons life holds for us, that is, if we approach life as a sort of school. If we approach life in this way, we graduate through our own efforts, by effectively embodying the lessons life presents to us. The magnificent thing about this life experiential school is, no one promotes us to the next class or level, but rather as we mature through our learning experiences, we naturally progress through the classes or levels.
Not everyone is here to learn lessons though. Some of us are here just for the joy of being and expressing life fully. I think possibly the ability to just be here now, and express my life in peace, love, joy and abundance is possibly what those struggling through the school of life, are really after. So, maybe if I am experiencing joy in this moment, this is the culmination of my attentiveness to being joyous here now. And this joyousness is self fueling and perpetuating to the extent that I remain present in this moment and immerse myself fully in this experiencing.
There is no price tag on experiencing your own innate joy. It wells up from within you by your own volition. If someone guides you to this experiencing, and you are grateful and appreciative of their guidance, you may wish to make an offering of gratitude to them for helping you to find this experiencing within yourself. And such an offering of gratitude happens after you’ve experienced firsthand the value of their guidance and thereby know the true value of what it is they have offered to you.
And such a teacher doesn’t provide you with the guidance for his own personal gain, but rather for you to experience the value of the guidance through your own experiencing. The teacher’s greatest reward is when the student fully embodies the life experiencing the guidance leads to. This is why I don’t say you need to pay me for the guidance I offer, because it isn’t worth anything until you embody it, and thereby realize the value of it. And when you embody the guidance, you truly know the value of it which often naturally results in gifts of appreciation and gratitude.
This sort of thing isn’t something someone should make you pay money for. It is an innate ability, within each of us, experienced through our own intention and attention to this moment, how we are feeling and what we are doing to engender this joyous life experiencing right now.
So reading this doesn’t really do it, does it? I’d have to say no if all you do is read this. There is no value realized by just reading this. The value is experienced through taking hold of the guidance and embodying it. This reading possibly points the reader in the right direction so that by his or her own volition, attention, focus and presence, he/she can unfold the joy in life in this moment to the extent that he/she has the capacity to do so. The capacity to do so is not static in that as one becomes more attuned to presence in being and attentive to moving more deeply into a joyous life experiencing, their capacity to experience this joy more deeply and more fully, naturally unfolds.
The value is in the embodiment and life experiencing in being; thereby you know how great the value is and have a real sense of appreciation and gratitude.
