Last fall, I went to San Diego for the ICF (International Coaching Federation) Global conference and met a whole crew of super cool coaches from the Colorado ICF Chapter. Including the president, who somehow charmed me into chairing the committee to plan the Chapter’s 30th anniversary celebration this year.
Because, well…me. 😂
I had forgotten how much of a sh*tshow it is to plan an event by volunteer committee, but I’ll save you the details of what it looked like to throw a pretty sweet party in a sweet historic venue in Denver, surrounded by great company where the average attendee age was approximately 76.4. 😆
All kidding aside, it was a lovely walk down memory lane where founders and past presidents highlighted key milestones from the past while turning the room towards what the next 30 might look like.
Thirty years is a lot of time for ideas, traditions, lessons, and beliefs to get passed from one group of humans to the next — sometimes without the next group having any clue where they came from, or if they still serve us.
And if you can’t tell, I’m not just talking about a coaching org anymore, so it seems like a pretty good time to question a few things this week.
1. Someone Fought for Your Normal.
Here's something I didn't know:
In the early 2000s, Colorado had a broad definition of psychotherapy that regulators believed could include coaching, which meant coaches could be required to register as unlicensed psychotherapists.
This was unique among all fifty states, and it escalated to the point that an ICF Master Certified Coach was accused of practicing psychotherapy and, without getting into details, ended up closing her coaching practice. She didn’t feel she could do business with the regulations in place.
Colorado coaches organized, fought back, and eventually got professional coaching exempted from this regulatory standard, putting it more in line with the rest of the country.
Years later, I became a coach without ever thinking about any of this; without their fight, I wouldn’t have even thought to start my business because navigating a very different regulatory path would have been a nonstarter.
Coach or otherwise, someone already fought an annoying fight that allows you to have what you have today.
Whether it's women having the right to vote, accessibility advocates fighting for ramps and curb cuts, people pushing for smoke-free public spaces, or generations protecting public lands and national parks, a lot of what feels normal today wasn't always.
🤔 How often is that true of the things we take for granted?
2. You Inherited More Than You Think.
Not everything we inherit has a paper trail as obvious as a 30-year-old legislative fight.
We inherit ideas about what success looks like, what a “good” career is, where we're supposed to live, how much money is enough, what relationships should look like, what we're capable of, and approximately 47,000 other rules nobody remembers agreeing to.
Some come from our parents. Some come from our communities, workplaces, cultures, friends, or the world we happened to grow up in.
And eventually, a lot of them stop feeling like things we learned and start feeling like things we simply know.
👉 Which is where things get interesting…(#3 will tell you why!)
3. Question the Hell Out of It
Don’t you love when themes come together? I talk about questioning inherited beliefs a lot, and last week's No More Mondays episode with Ebony McNeil falls squarely into this topic.
Ebony joined me for an episode called “Who Are You Becoming?”, and we talked about how much of who we think we are comes from beliefs and expectations we've absorbed throughout life, typically without ever sitting down to evaluate whether they align with our values (or someone else’s).
I've had plenty of my own: from picking a career and not sticking to it, moving further away from home than is typical in my family, to bucking the “safe is responsible” trend most parents impart on their children, I have spent the last twenty years choosing who I am becoming.
A decent chunk of Scary Good: Discovering Life Beyond the Sunday Scaries exists for that very reason.
😳 What do you believe because you've consciously decided it's true—and what do you believe because you've simply never questioned it?
4. When did the story become the truth?
This morning we listened to a fascinating Science Friday episode with Sam Kean, author of The Museum of Lost Things.
They were talking about the Library of Alexandria, the incredible amount of knowledge that disappeared from history, ancient technology that was WAY more advanced than I'd realized, and the caution required when we make assumptions about the past based on whatever evidence happened to survive.
And we'd already heard something similar earlier: a lot of what we call history is ultimately the story we've constructed from the information available to us.
Well, crap.
That feels relevant. 😜
It can be overwhelming to think about how this applies at a societal level, so let’s focus on our personal museum of lost (or needs-to-be-lost) things.
Something happens. We interpret it. We create a story about what it means. We repeat that story for ten years.
Eventually, we forget which part was fact and which part was interpretation.
🤨 What story have you built around what you know?
5. We get to choose what deserves to continue.
Not everything we inherit is bad; some of it can truly be a gift. The point is that we have an active role in taking stock of what we carry with us throughout our lifetime.
Once we realize we inherited a belief, system, tradition, or way of doing something, it's tempting to think questioning it means we need to replace it.
Nah.
Some old things are dumb. Some new things are dumb, too. 😆
The point isn't to automatically reject what came before us. It's to choose what deserves to continue.
Keep the thing because we examined it and still believe in it. Change the thing because we examined it and think we can do better.
💡 Choose participation over default.
6. The future doesn't have to look like the past.
Back to my little party. After looking backward at 30 years of coaching, the room spent some time imagining the next 30. I'll admit I was about 63% engaged during this part of the evening (truth 😬), but one comment caught my attention.
Someone suggested coaching could become even more important in the future because it's such a human activity.
Well, HI. 👋
I've literally stood on stages talking about the future of coaching being human, so yes, that one perked my ears up, but I also don’t think preserving the human part means preserving the profession exactly as it exists today.
Tools will change. Technology will change. The way people learn, work, lead, and get support will change.
💯 That’s just as true in coaching as it is in your life and work; the future doesn’t have to look like the past.
7. Remember: you're somebody else's “before.”
Yes. Read that again.
There's one detail about this celebration I didn't appreciate until afterward.
Upper Larimer's history goes back more than a century, and the main space was once an early luxury automobile showroom. Today, it's been restored into something entirely different while keeping pieces of what made it worth preserving.
We didn't choose the venue because that was an unexpectedly perfect metaphor for the occasion; we chose it because it looked cool…
But there we were, inside something preserved and changed, celebrating 30 years of something else that had been preserved and changed, while talking about what should happen next.
Thirty years from now, somebody will be inheriting what we're building today.
👏 What are you preserving and changing for the future?
What deserves to stay?
What needs to change?
And what are we creating now that someone else might someday take completely for granted?
We inherited a lot of our world from people we'll never meet. We get to choose what we keep and let go of, but we also have a responsibility for what we leave behind.
Might as well leave the next humans some good stuff.
Your Friend and Coach,
Angie
