LIVING WITH PAINPain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself,” Dr Albert Schweitzer ‘On the edge of the Primeval Forest’. More than one in eight people suffer chronic pain while one in five of these are diagnosed with depression due to pain, according to a UK Pain Society survey. Sixteen per cent said some days the pain was so bad that they wanted to die. HIV and pain: under-rated and under-treated Pain due to drugs side effects People living with HIV are in the vanguard of NHS treatments. We may not think ourselves lucky, but compared with people with other fatal diseases like cancers, HIV has excellent clinics with dedicated doctors and nurses freely available to help us deal with the various pains of living with the virus. And to get help, all we have to do is ask. |
THERAPY OF THE MONTH: PN’s John Clarkson gets a lift from a life coach and lives to tell the tale
I was ten minutes late for my session and a little apprehensive. The words ‘life coach’ conjured up a bossy gym teacher telling me to ‘get a grip’ and ‘pull my socks up’. Would he make me do press-ups and stand in the corner as punishment?
Luckily my coach David was nothing like that. After my frantic apologies he quickly put me at ease and explained what life coaching entailed. The gym teacher image wasn’t far off the mark, but he was more like a personal trainer: someone to help you work out what you want to achieve and how to achieve it. Nothing like scary Mr Saunders from school.
We started with a contract. Any decisions reached during the session would be mine, and he wouldn’t ask about any subjects I didn’t want to talk about. No “tell me about your childhood” questions to worry about.
Inevitably, then came the handy (if a little cheesy) acronym: GROW. G is for goals. Like a counsellor, a coach won’t pass judgement on your behaviour or tell you what to do. The main difference is that coaching is goal-orientated. And one of the main problems people come to coaches with is that they don’t know what their goals are. If you’re feeling aimless and unsure what you are doing with your life, coaching helps you work out exactly where you want to be by focussing on your values and passions. From these it’s a short jump to working out what changes in your life would benefit you the most.
R is reality. That career with the Royal Ballet might not be too hot an idea if you have peripheral neuropathy. Aiming too low could land you back in the rut that you are trying to get out of. Once your attainable goals have been identified, O is for all the options you have for achieving them. Which then brings you to the W: the what, where and when. The final part of the process it to develop an action plan to ensure you start moving toward your goal in a structured way. There is little point knowing where you want to go without a map and a good pair of walking boots.
Most people come to coaches with career problems but they can also assist with home-life, relationships issues, breaking destructive cycles of behaviour; anything you think could benefit from some objective assessment. The principles can also be applied to couples who have a joint goal. Blue Phoenix, the company David works for, has done group training with THT. Glynn Thomas, senior project manager with THT told me: “We were looking for a training session for the LADS and CLASH outreach teams to develop communication skills. David ran an hour-long session based on a forthcoming campaign which the teams were working on. This made it directly relevant to our day-to-day work, and everyone enjoyed it and found it very useful.”
Any kind of change can be scary. When you’re stuck in a comfortable rut, fear can make you think you want to stay there. “Every good athlete needs a coach and you’re no different,” says David. “A coach won’t do the running for you but they will certainly help motivate you to achieve your goals quicker.”
For someone who finds the “so-how-does-that-make-you-feel” style of counselling a little irritating, coaching’s more pragmatic approach was welcome. In our brief trial-session/interview David and I identified what goals would make me happiest, worked out what was stopping me achieving them and came up with a few ideas how I could overcome problems. Like many of us, fear of failure prevents me progressing in my chosen field of work. Rather than trying to ‘cure’ me of this David helped me visualise the problem and gave me a number of practical steps to overcome it. At the end of the session I felt what had been vague dreams were actually attainable. Not bad for just under an hour (I was late).
As yet there is no official accreditation body covering coaching. So ask where your coach trained and then check the place out on the internet or phone. You could ask if any of his or her ex-clients are prepared to speak to you about their experience. Have a long chat on the phone first to ensure you are comfortable and have a connection with your coach before you begin anything. Sessions aren’t cheap, so finding the right coach is important. There is no fixed rule about the number of sessions, as each client is looking for different outcomes, but most coaching relationships can produce results in around six sessions.
HIV can lead you to reassess your life. Things that you thought important seem silly, and paths you have ended up on may now seem like dead-ends. And if you’re feeling great after thinking you were going to die, you’ve got some pretty fundamental decisions to make. If you need pointing, and then maybe gently shoving, in the right direction then coaching could help you get where you want to be.
