Real Modern Man

Self-development is a catchall term denoting a process of continued growth past the normal stages of maturation, especially during adulthood. The term "self-development" often carries the connotation of "therapy," that is, dealing with personal problems causing life troubles in social interactions.

But there is another aspect of self-development: coaching.

Think about self-development as a coin. The tails side of the self-development coin represents counseling, looking back into the past to identify trouble issues and neuroses. The heads side represents coaching, identifying what is present and how to build on one's strengths for the future.

Tails

Counseling professionals or therapists, whatever their actual effectiveness, usually require governmental licensing to practice. This is very likely a good thing. The issues dealt with in counseling most often revolve around inappropriate emotional responses to highly socially stressful incidents and situations. For example, treating someone with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder requires understanding the operation of the hippocampus and amygdyla regions of the brain, where emotional responses occur before rational thought in the cerebral cortex begins. This is not something untrained people should be fooling around with. Counseling and therapy can also be thought of as a way to "unlearn" bad emotional habits.

Heads

Self-improvement coaches help build better, more productive emotional habits. Whether for business, dating or relationships, coaching can provide a valuable external perspective on our behavior. Especially our behavior in emotionally charged situations such as relationships.

Coaching is a well-established practice in many fields. Boxers, for example, rely on extensive coaching to learn and drill their skills. Relationship coaching (not to be confused with relationship counseling) is a much newer practice, with far fewer practitioners and even fewer guidelines on what constitutes successful coaching. What I have found from taking several workshops on the social arts is that my rapport with the instructors is the most important aspect. That is, the people are more important than the material.

Coaching yourself fundamentally requires inspiration. Without inspiration, the commitment to succeed and self-discipline required for self-coaching will not be present. Finding and maintaining this inspiration is my most difficult challenge, and it may be yours as well.

Coaching vs Counseling

Everyone can benefit from coaching, not everyone needs therapy. Therapy takes a person half the way, fixes what needs to be fixed. Coaching takes a person the rest of the way: making what's good the best it can be. There is a difference. Different people have different needs. Some people may need both.

How do you know what you need?

This is a really good question, and not one easily answered for most people. Here is a simple test: if coaching and self-help doesn't produce results, consider therapy with a licensed professional.

For example, no amount of coaching will help a world-class athlete compete, if her body is broken. First, her body must be healed, then coaching will vault her into the winner's circle. Similarly, for those learning the social arts, when our emotional responses negate the effectiveness of coaching, therapy can help eliminate those bad emotional responses. Then coaching can help build more effective emotional responses, allowing us to take action