Traveling Hopefully

I have a coaching colleague named Libby Gill whom I’ve known for awhile. I’ve never actually met her “in person”, but rarely would I ever meet a coaching client or colleague in person anyway. Someone in her circle has been a client of mine for a long time, so I’ve interacted with her over a period of time. She’s a coach and a writer.

I don’t usually read my colleague’s books, because it tends to be information I already know and work with myself, with my own clients. In general, coaching books lay out step-by-step processes for setting and achieving goals. They often include exercises for the reader to do, and examples from other people’s lives.

But because I know Libby, I’ve been thinking for awhile that I should read something she’s written. So I randomly picked one of her books, Traveling Hopefully, and ordered it.

Coaching tends to be practical and forward-looking, so usually the techniques don’t deal very much with past events. Coaching is mostly about, “Where are you now – where do you want to be – how are you going to get there?” So I was a little surprised when her book started out with childhood abuse and trauma.

Of course there are tons of books out there about trauma of all kinds. But the little I’ve read of them, I haven’t generally liked. They usually leave me feeling depressed and somehow damaged. I think in their effort to be sensitive, they end up being catastrophic and patronizing.

Libby’s approach is different. She starts with the trauma and then she moves on. Instead of writing a “trauma” book, she wrote a standard coaching book, but she took a step back and started with the trauma and then went forward with the practical self-knowledge and goal-setting exercises found in most coaching books.

I really liked how she handled the trauma at the beginning of the book. She was blunt, open and detailed, but also cool and professional. She didn’t minimize it, or gloss over it, but she also didn’t make it anymore than what it was.

Her account was straightforward – here’s what happened to her, here’s how those around her reacted (or failed to react), here’s the lingering effects on her of what happened, here’s exercises you can do to help move past your own trauma.

I also found her attitude toward her readers to be very respectful. She didn’t make any hesitant “maybe-you-aren’t-ready” or “maybe-you-can’t-handle-this” comments like, “If it’s not too painful…” No. Libby’s instructions assumed that her readers had their shit together and could do this. She says, “Think of five childhood dramas…write a short story – a paragraph or two – about each of the five childhood dramas you identified…” And so forth.

At this point in the book I didn’t think she really meant trauma-drama. I figured she just meant the time you didn’t get to go to the zoo because Grandma got sick. But then I turned the page and she shared her own childhood molestation story and I realized, oh. Damn. Her calm, cool demeanor does not mean that shit didn’t happen.

Then she went on to have us identify positive childhood events, and look at how those events shape our goals in adulthood. Of course doing the positive childhood event section was more fun than the “drama” section, but the balance of both was important.

Then the majority of the book continued with how to identify one’s own values, and set goals that reflect your values, and plan strategies for achieving those goals. I skipped all that, because I’m already obsessive about planning strategies for achieving goals, complete with timeframes and spreadsheets. (Right, John?) LOL.

We’re starting to plan for retirement, so John regularly gets emails from me that say things like, “When you get a chance, please send me several criteria of yours for a retirement location (such as “warm weather” or “nearby international airport”). Don’t worry about thinking of everything at once, this will be an ongoing exercise and we can add & alter things as we go.” (That was a real email, verbatim, from a couple of weeks ago. And I’ve sent many others of that sort.) His responses will go into a location scoring spreadsheet that I’ve already started.