People Aren’t Problems

You meet a lot of people in my line of work.

Some of them old, others young, some highly educated, others hustlers from birth, and some you just can’t get a read on no matter how hard you try. But all of them broken.

At least, that’s what I used to think.

The fact that people needed my help — that I was actually a person to be needed — was my favorite part of coaching. Fixing someone the way only I could made me feel valuable. Worthy somehow. They got healthy, but that was a side effect. I was coaching them for me. I was fixing because I’m a repairman and it made me feel good.

So I rode that high for a decade, looking at every problem person as just another junkie fix. The more I helped, the more they clung to me, and the more that satisfied the little demon in my mind that just couldn’t get enough.

Recently, however, I’ve taken on much more challenging cases. A white-haired, Elizabeth Taylor type with spinal fusion and a brain disorder. A young girl who’s broken more than 15 bones and moves like Jack Skellington. And a housewife in constant pain, with a spine so curved you’d think she was made of one big horse show. Problems right? All of them. But what happens when you can’t “fix” someone. What happens when you can’t reach in an undo the damage of that car crash, or IED or congenital defect? These problems, these people, well, they become unfixable, right? If so, we’ll that makes me a failure then.

For some time I struggled with this new found perception. Have you ever seen Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange? Early in the film, Strange is a real-life Doctor, not yet a supreme sorcerer, who only takes on challenging patients he knows he can fix. That was me. Give me the easy ones. But eventually that got old and I decided I needed a challenge. I just wasn’t ready for it. Or rather, my ego wasn’t.

Coming to terms with the fact that you’ve been lying to yourself for years is like seeing the sun for the first time and looking directly into it. I nearly quit. Then a doctor friend of mine said something that changed everything. “What if we get people back to seventy-percent; better than 50.”

Here’s a man who spent his life with people who can’t be “fixed.” Not entirely anyway. A man who saw more than a diagnosis, more than a problem, and aimed at making people better. He wasn’t making excuses for bad behavior or letting himself off the hook easy, he was tackling every so-called “problem” that came his way, each with the same verve and vigor as the last. And that’s when it hit me, people aren’t problems, they’re potential.

And I’m no a savior or even a mechanic, I’m a coach who can’t fix anything. People aren’t machines. Humans aren’t actually broken. No one is. But no one, at least that I’ve met, is done becoming a better individual either. There’s always more, deep within in us, that with the right mixture of motivation and stimulus, we can release. Untapped potential that comes out in a multitude of ways; performance, creativity, longevity, freedom.

It’s stunning what a simple change in perception can do. Stress melts, the spark returns, and that enormous ego shrinks down a size. Or maybe even two. Others see it too, in the way that you look at them. Less holier-than-thou, more understanding. No longer are they a problem you’re desperately trying to fix for your own profit, but rather, they’re a geyser of potential waiting to explode. They understand, probably for the first time, that they’re the ones making the changes and doing the heavy lifting. Because your view of them has changed, so has their view of themselves. Not only are they not their diagnosis, but they’re not their past or their habits. You’re not their salvation, either. You’re simply the coach who sees far enough beneath the surface to know they have so much more to give. You don’t all the answers, in fact, you don’t have any answers. You simply have a belief. A genuine belief in what another can accomplish when you’re beside them instead of above them.

Another beautiful thing happens when people cease being problems; they start being people again.