What do you want to be when you grow up?
Teachers used to love asking this. I don’t know if they still do, but I understand the correct answer these days is “influencer.”
It’s a silly questions to ask kids, about as useful as “Hey, kid. What direction do you see your life going?” As if any of us had any clue about outcomes beyond snack time, let alone direction or what I tend to call vectoring these days.
“Veterinarian,” was my stock answer, at least until junior high. That’s when it turned into something like “I dunno,” as was my answer to anything adults wanted me to care about.
As a teenager, my vector was mac n’ cheese.
Adult me really wishes the vet thing had stuck, but it seems I’ve never chosen the easier path. I don’t know if this has anything to do with being a man, but I suspect some there’s some Venn crossover on how men experience directionality.
Forget penis sizes. Before we all had GPS in our pockets, men would drive around lost and late like it defined our very manhood.
On one hand, many of the men I know are in professions that are objectively a good fit, even as I’m suspicious about how much they really enjoy those professions. Other men I know are doing work they do not find rewarding.
As the saying goes, pick your hard.
Since I’m already well down Stereotype Lane, there’s one way men definitely share a kind of directional hopelessness. Yes. I’m talking about asking for directions.
Forget penis sizes. Before we all had GPS in our pockets, men would drive around lost and late like it defined our very manhood. How shameful, not knowing where we were or where we were going, but to admit to another human? Lord.
It’s like men are kinda fine to be lost where we are, more so than we’re willing to admit we’re lost. To this man, life feels like this all the time, at least when I pay close attention.
Admitting that I’m lost where I am feels like just another setback. To what? I don’t know. Even as I’ve honed my professional vector into something counseling-shaped, that hasn’t solved the feeling of being lost.
Yes, I’m headed toward a vector. I still feel lost en route.
Admitting that I’m lost where I am feels like just another setback.
Making matters worse, I always seem to pick the harder route. Except that, at this age, it’s stopped feeling like I have a choice. Choosing which way to go feels about as agentic as going bald.
There was a flow already in motion. I just followed it.
Professionally, this year comes to mind. I took on a new school of coach training, a more nervous system or body-focused style of coaching. It’s not the school I started in, which was more outcome driven.
They’re both methods of dialogue and reflection geared toward something shaped like greater contentment.
The relevance for this coach is that I find myself down the river of something that feels strangely like the moment I realized the pink patch on the back of my head was more than “just a little baldness.”
The choice seemed obvious—shave it—and yet I wasn’t sure.
In even deeper irony, the method of coaching I’m moving toward offers something one could poorly describe as: A way to grapple with this uncertainty we’re always in, but rarely facing until we take a selfie with a mirror behind us.
This move, the one where life seems to be pointing us in a direction we never chose, might be what the Tibetan Buddhist leader Trungpa Rinpoche calls a choiceless choice.
It’s a choice that feels like I need to do something, when there’s nothing for me to actually do. Whatever the “it” is, tends to sort itself out like how water always finds its way.
"Choicelessness is having no room to turn around or retrieve anything from the past. Things get very clear when you are cornered but not held captive or imprisoned. When you don't have any choice you begin to give up."
~Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche
In short, I feel like I need to choose between two coaching paths, even as a part of me realizes that’s just a story. And it’s not true beyond that story.
In wildly simplified terms that will probably annoy real philosophers (and some coaches reading this), one is more about taming nature. The other is more about living with it. With few exceptions, I tend more toward the latter, philosophically.
As if selling one’s self as a coach wasn’t hard enough, this new path introduces a whole bunch of spooky concepts like parts and fields, which are fine in science, but weird when talking about one’s relationship with the self.
It’s exactly the direction I want to move with my practice, and exactly the direction I suspect will make it only harder to find success.
That means, talking about topics I tend to keep to myself. It means more fully embracing who I seem to be, if not whom I seem to be becoming, and it means that some people just won’t get it.
I’m a coach who talks about spooky shit now, like fields and parts, and I don’t mean fields of grain and auto parts. I mean the parts of ourselves we often overlook or dislike, and the fields of experience that we sometimes notice but often miss.
It means hard, a different brand of hard than most men I know.
And I just find a part of myself wondering something thematic: Why couldn’t I have just gone to veterinary school?
Another part answers, “Because it wasn’t for me.”
Whatever the hell that means.
Thanks for being here.
~Damon
Men
My friend and talking partner, Richard DAmbrosio and myself have been creating a course for men. We’re getting close to launching the beta—later this month🤞—which means we’re looking for participants.
The beta is four weeks. It’s exactly ZERO dollars. We have spots lefts.
If you’re interested, DM me.
This got me wondering, Damon, and it's a question I ponder often given all my interests and career avenues: Does it need to be a choice, or can it be a "yes, and"?
Good read. As i have gotten older and more mature, I fould i actually enjoy the interaction of asking for help...or directions on rare occasions. No matter how old you are, we still have so much to learn. Wisdom comes with age and i enjoy learning from those whom may know more than me or at the least something new I didn't know. It definitely was not always that way.