The non-linear life - A guest post by Kathy Lu
Welcome to 2025
By this point in January you’ve probably made, and broken, several New Year’s resolutions already.
You might love New Year’s resolutions, you might hate them, you might be meh about them, you might ignore them entirely.
I’m a little of all of that myself.
In my coaching work I am often helping clients to develop a vision, dream big, set goals, have a plan.
And there’s value in that.
And there’s also a problem with that.
And the problem with this was so perfectly described by fellow coach and wonderful human being
, that I asked if I could share her article with you all, and she graciously agreed.I know Kathy as someone who is quiet in a world that prefers loud, sensitive in a world that prizes tough, and caring in a world that rewards expedient. Yet the very things that make her “different” are what make her wonderful in my book—and what support her making such a positive difference in the world.
The non-linear life
Kathy Lu
First published on Kathy’s blog
When people who are new to coaching ask me about the overarching coaching process, I still find myself conflicted about how best to respond. In my very personal experience, there are two kinds of answers. One kind is more comforting and popular, and the other kind is decidedly less so. One kind can make you feel like a failure as a client, and the other kind can make you feel like a failure as a coach.
The more comforting, popular kind of answer is the kind that is easy to sketch on handy-dandy cocktail napkins with basic shapes and arrows. It lays out a straightforward approach from goal-setting to transformation, challenge to resolution, question to answer. It assumes that you have goals just itching to be scratched, and that said goals can be clearly defined and subdivided, the challenges readily identifiable and explorable, and all obstacles surmountable by sheer force of will and relentless reframing. It requires that the goals you have are steadfast and unchanging, that they stay like perfectly trained dogs for as long as it takes to achieve them.
Above all, this kind of answer colludes with the notion that things are fundamentally linear in nature—that there are progressive steps and stages, and if only we can know exactly what those steps and stages are (or buy access to the privilege of that information), we can design our path to each successive milestone and navigate our lives with greater ease and enviable aplomb. We won’t need to suffer any more than is strictly necessary to advance; maybe, if we’re working with the right guru or expert, we can even sidestep the stages that feel too hard. When whatever we’ve doing is not working, we may believe that we must be doing something wrong. We must not have understood or executed the plan properly. We must not want it badly enough. We must be wired too differently.
Perhaps pause and consider: What expectations and assumptions do you have around progress in any of the following areas of your life?
Your career or area of expertise
Your business or side hustle or passion project
Your productivity
Your practice of anything
Your grieving of any loss, tangible or intangible
Your experience of any transition, voluntary or involuntary
Your romantic relationships
Your familial relationships
Your social relationships
Your physical health
Your emotional health
Your mental health
Your recovery from anything, including burnout
Your children’s development
Your development
It’s a short list of things that would be so much easier to experience if they were as linear in nature as we’d like to hope. When they’re not—when we believe in the illusion of steps and trajectories—our disappointment curdles into shame and judgment. We judge ourselves, others, and the world around us for failing to live up to our expectations.
That’s what I see with the first kind of answer. It’s the kind of answer we’re generally socialized to believe in and buy into because regressing and backtracking are just so “unproductive.” (Exactly what are we trying so hard to produce?)
Here is a less popular kind of answer. It doesn’t sound like an answer. It’s harder to convey. It normalizes not yet knowing what we want and questions how we can begin to know when so many parts of ourselves want so many different things. It admits that progress is neither linear nor predictable, and that there is a longer, messier “messy middle” to any transition than most people would like. There are no trails and mile-markers, but rivers and rapids. There are feelings of accelerating and decelerating, cresting and falling over leaps, dips, waves, and spirals. There is motion and rest, growth and dormancy, clarity and confusion, gathering and scattering. There are cumulative changes and stacked losses, ungrieved grief and unresolved hurt. There are systems we create and perpetrate, resist and dismantle. There are questions to ask and answers to question, beginnings to end and endings to begin.
As we explore these experiences with compassion and curiosity, we discover more and more our capacity to be fully alive to the world and our place in it. We learn how to be our own self, and we learn how to live our own life.
This beautiful, non-linear life.
October 31, 2024
For me, and maybe for you, this feels like a much more inviting way to approach 2025. It feels much kinder to gently contemplate what kind of journey I want to be on in 2025, than simply list what I want to accomplish.
Of course I want to accomplish things! I absolutely have ideas, dreams, goals and ideas. (And here’s the process I’m using with myself and clients to do just that)
But I’m trying to approach them more with Kathy’s beautiful spirit of compassion and curiosity, not must and shoulds.
Happy New Year, everyone.
Sue
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