Help someone. Feel good.

Today I got a thank you text from someone I have been coaching.

The engagement with this person started as a pro bono career coaching engagement where I wanted to practice my coaching skills and clock some hours towards my ICF certification. But when I did the first discovery session with the coachee, he discovered that most of his career related stress was actually coming from a vacuum in his personal life.

He started by telling me that he was stressed at work because he was not able to control his temper, he was not able to develop working relationships with colleagues, he was not able to manage his team members without coming across as arrogant and impatient, and all this was leading to his management not giving him opportunities to grow.

This was leading to more stress that made it difficult for him to sleep well. Lack of good sleep was affecting his focus and productivity at work. The whole thing was turning into a vicious circle leading to more stress, and he was not able to break out of it. Through my coaching questions, he finally zeroed on the reason for his stress which turned out to be the broken relationship with his parents.

So, while I don’t consider myself a life coach by any measure, we agreed to focus on improving the relationship with his parents in the next session. It turned out that he and his parents had a set of expectations from each other, but none of them were trying to see things from each other’s perspective. It was a classic case of a generation gap gone too big. The situation was made worse by the fact that the parents live in a small semi-rural town in the hinterland of India, while my coachee lives in a bustling metropolis. He works for a new age start-up whose area of business would not be understood even by someone who completed their college education ten years ago.

The problem was that both parties wanted the other party to change, without trying to change themselves. When we started talking, this came up like a “Eureka” moment to my coachee, and he decided to drop his expectations and start seeing things from his parents’ perspective. He had not spoken to them for several weeks, but decided to start making video calls to them everyday, sharing bits of his life on Whatsapp, and trying to take interest in their life. He came up with a full fledged project plan to improve the communication between his parents and himself and committed himself to executing it.

Today when he sent me that thank you text, it was to tell me that he was on track with his project plan and there was a huge improvement in his feelings towards his parents (and vice versa). He told me that before talking to me he was always at a loss of words or subjects to talk about when his parents called him. But now he was spending time talking about the small things of life, about only the present moment, without getting into the knots of their past or trying hard to show their own perspective to each other, and it was working.

It was leading to a higher degree of calmness in his mind, making him sleep better, work better and relate better with people around him. He and I conduct our meetings over Skype since we live in different countries. He sent me a series of texts today telling me what a big difference he had seen in his life just by implementing a few simple things that he had arrived at during the coaching sessions with me.

While the whole action plan was built by him, I had played a small role in guiding him towards it. And when he told me about his success and thanked me for changing his life, it felt very good. I felt so good and positive about myself just listening about the improvement in his communication with his parents.

I just realized all over again that one of the best ways to feel good is to help someone else feel good. Someone telling you that you made their day or made a positive impact on their lives, can make you feel very good. It need not be a prolonged coaching session — one can make someone feel good just by giving them a smile, a compliment, a small gift or just a thank you note. The minute you make someone else feel good, you feel good too. It’s like magic. So, whenever you want to feel good, go ahead and make someone else feel good, and see a magical change in your own happiness index.