Pssst, you there! Yes, you with the relaxed expression! May i ask you something? Please tell me what nutritional concept you used to plan your breakfast today. And, if you have children, according to which criteria you combine school sandwiches, Tupperware and drinking bottles. One more thing: who helped you get dressed? I beg your pardon? Don’t have a coach? ohh But you are resistant to advice! But perhaps you have just missed one of the most important social trends of the last ten years: hand-knitted self-help for everything. And everyone.
Before that became fashionable, you could still crack therapist jokes with impunity at parties, along the lines of: Americans, wink, wink, they’d rather call their shrink than their best buddy if they have problems. Today, the psychoanalyst has long since been replaced in Germany by a number of specialized service providers: from career coaches to flirt coaches, from personal trainers for the defined thigh muscles to shopping coaches for stylish appearances. There is even a note on the lamp post in my neighborhood with coaching to go. Every morning I ask myself whether they also have an answer to my most important question in life at the moment: How do I synchronize the walking speed of a two-year-old and a five-year-old, who should sit at the singing circle in kindergarten by nine at the latest? And both in slippers?
We only need one coach
No question: In some life situations, a neutral third party gets you further than your best friend. Because he sees more from a distance than we do in our everyday little things. My friend Bettina complained about her job for years (civil servant feeling, but without civil servant privileges). Then a single session with a job trainer was enough to dare to start a new career: After Bettina had uttered the words “That’s not possible anyway” 17 times within 17 minutes, the specialist asked a counter question on the 18th time: “ Why not?” Bettina was flabbergasted. And we friends were ashamed that this simple sentence had never occurred to us.
But apart from such cases of hardship, I find it strange when adults absolutely need expensive advice in order to survive normal everyday madness. For example, to address singles willing to mate (“Do we want to have a drink first or drive straight to my place?”). Just why? Because we are all looking for definitive answers in the metaphysical crisis of meaning? Don’t go to church on Sundays? No more friends? Or, worst of all, because we no longer trust our own life experiences?
I am convinced that basically we only need one coach. One that gives us so much confidence in our own decisions that it makes itself superfluous. Who credibly assures us that there is only one single, all-round competent expert for our lives: we ourselves. Excuse me, what are you saying: you know someone like that? Can I give the contact details… how, everyone has them at home? I have to think about this first.
