Coaching for Inner Peace

Can coaches help clients find inner peace?

Often coaches are presented with a succession of issues that trouble their client – at work, at home; the list seems to be endless.

It’s easy for both coach and client to start believing that there is an underlying ‘big issue’ driving this flow, and that if you could only get to it and root it out, then things would be ‘OK’.

It’s certainly worth exploring for such an issue.

The great coaching question “If you solved that, what would you get that is even more important than that?” can produce huge insights.

But it’s wisest to carry out this search in a cautious, philosophical manner. You may find an answer; you may not.

Don’t over-rely on the dream

Most likely you will find a key that unlocks some issues but not others. It can be dangerous to over-rely on the dream that if only you could find and fix this one, elusive mega-issue, the client’s life would be one of endless happiness.

Life doesn’t work that way; it is a regular flow of problems and difficulties, some irritations, some genuinely heartbreaking.

Clients often answer the question above (or a series of such questions) with a desire for ‘inner peace’. However life isn’t designed to lead us to this: while we want our clients to be resilient, we don’t want to encourage false hopes.

“We can learn to be at peace with not being at peace”

Maybe true inner peace lies in accepting that life will never provide us with perfect, unbroken peace. Inner peace requires us to accept a new wisdom which is best summed for me by a quote from David Woolfson:
“We can learn to be at peace with not being at peace”.

I have personally found this very consoling and grounding at difficult times in my own life.