On reinvention, self-belief, and the quiet efficiency of a well-timed absence.
Today marks exactly thirty years since my Life Coach died. I call him mine, though in truth he had very little time for me once he upgraded himself to that fashionable title. I knew him better when he was still a DJ, then a marketing consultant, and later an advertising man, each reinvention slightly more lucrative than the last.
Our contact faded precisely when he became a Life Coach. His calendar filled up with alarming speed, and the country estate he had acquired began to demand the kind of attention normally reserved for minor nobility. Booking him required a lead time of six or seven months, which already tells you everything you need to know.
I would let him schedule something, forget about it entirely, and then receive a call in which he cheerfully explained that the gap I had created in his agenda had allowed him to earn a significant amount of money. It was perhaps the most honest thing he ever said to me.
In the final years of his career, our relationship existed almost entirely by telephone. I do not recall ever asking him for advice, yet he delivered it with unwavering confidence. It was advice I could easily have formulated myself. He knew that, but believed it gained authority by passing through his mouth.
In his younger years, the traffic went both ways. He complained endlessly about heart palpitations while drinking heroic quantities of coffee that could have stripped paint from a wall. I suggested he limit himself to two cups before lunch. He followed the advice with surprising obedience, and the palpitations vanished. It remains, to this day, my most successful coaching intervention.
I also assisted him with his nearly nonexistent love life by recommending the removal of the two warts on his face. He resisted, of course. He considered them distinguishing features, integral to his charm. In a sense, he was right. They did define him, just not in the way he imagined. It never once occurred to him that they might be off-putting, although it is difficult to believe he escaped childhood without being reminded of it.
I regarded him as a mildly sympathetic fraud. He, on the other hand, maintained a self-image that hovered somewhere between poetic and delusional.
He was the rare individual who could sustain a complete bubble of self-admiration without the assistance of social media, and decades before it became fashionable. He needed no external validation system. He generated his own supply.
It is entirely plausible that he believed this combination of self-love and blind optimism qualified him as an excellent Life Coach.
None of it prevented him from collapsing one day during a corporate coaching session, felled by a heart that had, at last, decided to object.
The person who informed me still holds it against me that I laughed. Not out of shock, but because the title presented itself immediately, fully formed and irresistible: The Life Coach Is Dead.
Death has a way of provoking a frantic search for meaning. It took me years to find mine. It arrived quietly, almost as an afterthought, when I noticed that everyone had started behaving like a Life Coach, precisely at the moment the profession itself had gone out of fashion.
That, I suppose, was his final success.