It is with a heavy ‘clunk’ that I land at my life coach’s digital door. It’s November 2022 and my days are a weird mix of activity and boredom – laden with tasks and lacking in vibrancy. The drumming daily impact of my mother’s death in the summer has curdled with the inertia of the pandemic and is manifesting as getting to-dos done with a dogged determination. It’s the method I used to get through the glassy early days of grief. But now it’s reverberating, like a ringing in your ears after a night out.

Everything is fine; everything is insipid. I’m going to the gym, but dragging myself there in the evening, rather than happily setting off at 7am. I’m getting work done, but ideas don’t come fluidly. Weekly counselling sessions eviscerate the past, a process I need, but one which leaves me depleted.

I bend my thumb into a permanent comma shape from hours lost to Instagram holes. I buy fistfuls of sweet and salty snacks from the Co-op with a passion not seen since sixth form. My social life and my relationship are joyful, fizzy tonics, but the weekend’s fun contrasts sharply with Sunday night fear. The raw shock of a seismic loss has burned out, but I’m left with the sensation that I’m out of step with the world’s rhythms, moving awkwardly, missing the beat.

It’s in this state that I sign up for a 6 week block of sessions with Victoria Joy, (@spreadingthejoy) a former magazine editor and, nowadays, a ‘clarity and consistency coach’.

What is life coaching?

If you think that sticking the word ‘coach’ at the end of most words has become an easy way to invent a new occupation for yourself, you wouldn’t be alone. There are career coaches and confidence coaches and executive coaches and financial coaches and relationship coaches and embodiment coaches. There are God-tier celebrity coaches (including megastar ‘peak performance coach’ Tony Robbins, who has been accused of multiple serious misconducts – claims he denies) and a steady stream of mid-career-switch coaches providing services to normal people grasping for direction.

The industry is unregulated and tightly wound up with the self-help scene. It can be expensive, with a chunk of sessions often costing hundreds of pounds. All of this makes it easy to sneer at as fluffy, or for hapless, rich navel-gazers.

Some coaches, though, are well qualified to dispense advice – and some are consulted by the hyper-successful (Oprah, Serena Williams and Leonardo DiCaprio have all worked with one.) Besides, someone to lean on and to work things out with as you try to re-structure your life starts to seem sensible when you think about how accountability is correlated with actually getting things done. This is something Victoria knows deeply.

With the fruits of over a decade working in health journalism lodged in her grey matter, her knowledge of how the human brain works is encyclopaedic, something bolstered by her diploma in transformational coaching. (Some red flags to watch out for if coach-hunting include the offering of mental health advice without appropriate qualifications and presenting as a silver bullet to your problems without making it clear that you need to put in the necessary work to make things happen.)

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Victoria is on my radar because she used to work at Women’s Health, where she often edited my work. I knew her to be grounded, wise and warm: delivering praise where it was due but with no qualms about holding you to a higher standard. It was her style of kindly-delivered accountability I was craving to shake me up.

How is life coaching different to therapy?

Life coaching, it should be noted, is not therapy. It doesn’t hinge on examining how your childhood informs your subconscious, or on mining the past. Rather, it’s rooted in the future, on achieving desirable change, working out new goals and creating a realistic plan to achieve them.

This is not to say that you should turn up to a session expecting to be given a detailed spreadsheet of things to alter and steps towards a shiny new life, no input from you needed. Instead, says, Victoria, a good coach should be able to syringe out of your brain what you already know to be true.

As she puts it: ‘It’s a collaborative process. The coach believes that the client already has all of the knowledge they need to make positive changes and meet their goals, and the coach can facilitate them or draw them out. The idea is to help you to realise your own potential and help you to get there’.

What happens in life coaching?

Ahead of my first Zoom session, I fill in a detailed form on what I want out of the experience. I identify how I feel now (‘lost,’ ‘overwhelmed’ ) and where I want to be, at the end of our chunk of time working together (‘liberated.’) I write that the pandemic coinciding with my mum being sick and planning my wedding propelled me into a ‘just get it done’ way of being, manic but dull. I tell her I want more space; to re-gain the trust in my instincts that has gone wandering off along the way. I tell her I’m seeking a clear vision of what I want my career to look like in the coming years, to feel the spark of ambition light back up.

It means that when we begin, we have a focus. We talk through the building blocks of my life and the order in which they are prioritised. We think about practical ways to gain more time, on a daily basis (giving my phone to my husband on work from home days, noting in my calendar that I don’t make plans on Monday or Tuesday evenings are two examples.)

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I fire up these changes right away. Because I can contact Victoria on messaging app Telegram any time I like between sessions, I let her know. The stream of positive affirmation I receive back unlocks a dopamine hit that makes me want to do it again. I am in year 3 and being given a shiny golden star sticker at the bottom of my story all over again. It is bliss.

In the next session, we start to work on my ‘values’. Mine, it transpires, include curiosity, reliability, generosity and ethics. I’m given homework – a podcast to listen to on the theme, and the task of writing down to what extent what I do with my time stacks up with the things I claim to care about the most.

Stuff starts to make sense. If I do nothing to engage my curiosity in a day, it’s going to feel banal. One of my core values is health, so a lack of movement or nourishing food hits hard not only because it does’t make anyone feel good, but because it doesn’t chime with something that’s profoundly important to me.

How does life coaching change things?

Weeks go on. Discussing what makes me feel good for an hour every Tuesday means I begin to feel more alight. I’m keeping up my habits – handing over my phone and watching my screen time dissolve, circling the early weekday nights for reading or yoga or whatever. I start to regain a sense of control. At the end of each session I’m emailed a detailed break down what we discussed and what my week’s action points are. I refer back to these like they contain next week’s Lottery numbers.

Daily, I feel more clear, that I am beginning, again, to hack away at what I want. On paper, it’s all straightforward stuff. But having someone to report back to on how I am doing means it happens, and doesn’t live only in my head as a ‘I should.’

I’m applying Victoria’s formula and pausing before doing something (opening Twitter, walking to the corner shop) to ask myself: ‘is this helpful or unhelpful?’ Typically, it’s the latter, and I breathe, before saying I’ll do it in an hour if the desire is still there. Often, it’s not. I tell Victoria in Telegram and radiate in the glow of her emoji-heavy hype.

In one session, together, we craft a plan for what I want the next stage of my life to look like. We label goals and the little steps that will get me there. I finish with an excitement in my belly I’ve not had in years. I tell her she’s amazing. She tells me she drew out what was already there.

When the sixth session comes to a close, I feel all scrubbed up and fresh. I’ve got practical tools to help me navigate my weeks and I’ve had the genuine desire to make stuff happen sparked back up, with long-dormant feelings re-revealed. The new year arrives and I sign up to a daily meditation challenge. I keep up circling some of my time, but leave space for joy and fun. I leave my bastard phone downstairs after breakfast and before lunch.

No one thing can sprinkle fairy dust all over your life, and I still have heavier days, some with endless minutes lost to the scroll or where I feel more gauzy than alert. But they are fewer. The stagnation is lifting. My lightness is coming back.

A one-off two hour ‘power session’ with Victoria is £227. Six 60-90 minute sessions plus daily app support are £827. You can book a free 30 min intro call, anytime and can access free resources and her free newsletter, here.