As I’m thinking about ways to turn my blog into a full time job, I had a look at various coaching methods and took advantage of some free trainings. It seemed to me that they were all based on the ‘mindset’ principle, so basically if you believe it will happen, it will happen. I didn’t think that is good enough for me (even though two weeks ago I was still blogging about manifesting) and I thought I needed something more concrete, even if just because of me being autistic.

Yesterday I saw an add from a business coaching organisation, so that seemed more like what I needed. I will not be disclosing the organisation name here, although I technically could. Basically they had an online program on offer that looked very promising: it would offer me the opportunity to think through my values, purpose, limitations and the likes. It sounded really good.

But it was just me, no access to a tutor or even group discussion. And it was 330 quid. A bit much for access to some videos, huh?

I did the first two modules that were free and already came accross problems: in the first module I was asked to list the most important events from my life and assess how happy I was when they happened. That was the exact question: not what feelings I was experiencing but how happy or unhappy I was. I wasn’t sure whether I should take the question directly, but if not directly then how I was supposed to translate it to myself?

Let’s take moving to the UK. It was pretty significant event, wasn’t it? But I had no idea how I could rate my happiness. At first I was really excited to go but then, when I came here, I was shocked and overwhelmed. So happy or unhappy? Finally I rated myself as being in the middle of the happiness axis and it looked like I was neutral, so I guess that would mean no strong feelings. And that was so far from the truth!

I was shocked how people, who were possibly neurotypicals, could have come up with such an oversimplification.

The second module was about reflecting what worked well in my life so far and what didn’t. But the problem here was, I already knew that, but I didn’t know how to change it. And I still don’t. As I said, there was no one to ask any questions (not that the person would necessarily know the answer).

And I started wondering, do people actually sign up for that? Do they feel any better about answering the questions in the videos? Do they feel they benefit from them?

Or possibly they only pay so that they could join LinkedIn alumni group on completion and do some networking there? What do you think? Is that something that neurotypical person could do? Because I wouldn’t. And the networking wouldn’t work for me anyway.