COLUMN: Put me in, Coach: Life from the sidelines
As you look over the piles of food and into your inevitable future displayed in flashing DNA neon clarity on the faces of your relatives, you quietly panic. It is as thought you are being enveloped by a free-floating cloud of angst that fills the room like the smoke from a backed up fireplace on a windy New England winter night. You cough and excuse yourself to the bathroom. You feel your wallet in your back pocket and remember the business card for a Certified Life Coach that you picked up at the counter of the organic goat ranch just outside of Austin, Texas. You pull out your cell phone and hurriedly call the number.
“Coach?” you say to the gruff man who answers. “Yeah, I know it’s Thanksgiving, but I need some help here. I’m totally overmatched and trapped here. All the relatives have more grandchildren and better jobs. Even my gay second uncle has a Chinese baby that he and his partner Stan adopted. I’m starting to look like my father and we even started to agree on politics. I don’t think I can make it. You need to take me out of the game, even if it’s for a little while. I need some oxygen. I need steroids. I need something!”
“Don’t panic kid; you’ve got to hang in there,” the life coach says. “Everybody gets butterflies when the game is on the line and the odds are against them. December is the World Series of family gatherings. Anybody can make it through a funeral or wedding. That stuffs for second-stringers. You’re in the big leagues now. Where would be if we gave up on the beaches of Normandy? What if Einstein has said he hated math? What if the Titanic hadn’t gone full speed ahead?”
“What?” you ask.
“OK, that last one was a bad example, but I’m a little drunk, it’s late and this is the first time I’ve ever talked to you, what do you expect?” he says, “Now cowboy-up son and get back out there and win one for the Gipper.”
“The Gipper?” you scream, “That movie is, like, 50 years old.”
“OK, win one for the home team, Lindsey Lohan, democracy; whatever it takes,” he mumbles. “Sorry, I have to go; I have George Bush on the other line. The Gipper thing always works on him. And, it’s not shaping up to be a great Thanksgiving in Crawford.”
The previous scenario may only represent my usual paranoia, but life coaches are real.
I really like the idea of having a life coach so that I could have someone to blame, fire or at least put out there in the free agent market. It’s hard to fire your parents or trade for new ones, but a life coach is something a little more manageable.
I wonder what it says about us as a society. Weren’t our parents supposed to be life coaches? But sometimes, like the stranger on the plane, it is easier to spill to someone you either don’t know or you are paying large amounts of money. Free advice is only worth its price.
Not surprisingly, more men use life coaches than women because it fits their sports aesthetic. Or does it? For me, it also brings back bad memories of being benched. How can you be benched in your life? Or, what if you get a life coach is like Bobby Knight and he starts throwing chairs at you? And what about drugs? Are illegal substances OK if they improve your life? Who does the testing? How long can you get your life suspended?
I imagine it all going terribly wrong. What if you find out your spouse’s life coach is pitted against yours on a crucial decision. She paid big bucks with incentive clauses and you hired the grizzled whisky-breath veteran. It comes down to the wire and your coach throws in the towel.
On second thought, I don’t like the idea of a life coach. I think I’ll stick with pop psychology books, alcohol, religion and self-affirmations.
Dennis Hinkamp does not have a life coach but if he did it would be somebody like the drill sergeant in “An Officer and a Gentleman.”