It was earlier this year that Rahma decided that she “needed some advice to help her make some difficult decisions.” Even though both of her parents had begged with her to give herself ample time before committing to this "religious duty," the 18-year-old university student was trapped with the desire to give up the headscarf she had chosen to wear at the age of 12 against their best recommendations.
“They told me that it is a requirement of all Muslim women but that I did not have to take it so early on and that I needed to wait for a while to make sure that once I take it, I will stick to it; my mother actually told me that she only took the veil after she graduated, started a career and got married,” Rahma recalled. At the time, it seemed to Rahma that covering up was the thing she “wanted to do.” “There was no pressure at all; it was just my wish,” she said.
Today, however, “there is pressure against abandoning it.” “I cannot say that I am forced to stick to it but they are telling me that people would look down upon me if I abandoned the veil and that my image as a decent girl would be questioned,” she said. However, she added that at her heart she no longer feels that covering her hair or sticking to any particular dress code is inevitably a crucial part of her religious commitment.
This 18-year-old, who is studying history, is in a position where she must decide whether to accept an engagement proposal from a neighbour who she always believed she love, which only serves to muddle matters more. “He just got a job, shortly after he graduated and he says that he wants to get married as soon as I graduate; I thought I wanted to get engaged not to get married upon my graduation in three years; but my parents are unhappy with my hesitation and they rightly tell me that this guy is my choice and if I am not sure I should be honest and tell him,” Rahma said.
Eventually, Rahma decided to opt for life coaching in the hope of finding answers to her big questions. “When I first started my sessions earlier in the year, I thought I would share my problem and get advice on what to do but this was not how it worked,” Rahma said. Instead, she added, her life-coach, a woman in her early 40s with a medical background, “was asking me questions not giving me answers.” “We went through lots of questions and in the process of my answers, I managed to come to terms with some facts and to make plans on some things,” she said.
According to Eman Fawzi, a life coach for a little under a decade, this is precisely the purpose of life coaching: “to help individuals find their answers through discrete and candid conversations that are judgment-free and bias-free.”
As a certified and experienced life-coach, Fawzi is never in the business of giving advice or trying to explain the root of any individual’s behaviour. “I am not a therapist; as a life coach I am there to help [individuals] who choose to seek my help to think things through and to make some decisions, in view of their own realities and their own abilities,” she said. This, she said, is the way with all individuals, young or old.
“When they ask me my opinion, my answer would be that you have all the answers… and that I am here to help with my deep questions,” she said. She continued to say more or less, the job of a life coach is similar to that of a good and trusted friend, except that a friend may give advice while a life coach does not, and that a friend may have some emotional bias while a trained and certified life-coach is always capable of being neutral and candid while still being compassionate and accommodating.
Young people, particularly those in Generation Z and older, are among the important groups of the population who have been pursuing life coaching, according to Fawzi. This, she argued, is both the function of their own awareness of what life-coaching is about, “so they don’t take it lightly,” and also “because this generation of young men and women in Egypt is faced with some many serious questions that would not have necessarily bothered people their age two or three decades ago.”
Furthermore, she added, with the enormous effect of social media and influencers, who have been virtually establishing expectations for young people on a variety of things, including how they should look and how their homes should be, “this generation is coming under a lot of pressure that is sometimes so hard to cope with, especially in view of the counter pressure that comes from their real-life communities, again on how they should be.”
Young men and women today, according to her, have important questions about religion and faith in general. She continued by saying that they have numerous concerns regarding their sexuality and their right to make their own decisions in this regard. “Now my role as a life coach is not to lecture them about what is right or wrong from my view or that of society or even that of their own social circles; my role is to help them decide what they want to do and what they will be happy and comfortable with doing,” she said. Ultimately, she added, “there is never any pressure about being positive all the time because we have to accept that people, including young people, are entitled to feel down and we don’t take these sentiments lightly and say silly things like, young people should be worry-free or that kind of thing.”
Fawzi explained that her job is to ask clients questions that will help them determine their level of satisfaction with all important aspects of their lives, such as their health, appearance, income, and social situation, and then to work with them on the goals they need to achieve and how to get these goals accomplished at their own pace and within their own means, whether she is working with someone who is 18 or 78 and they decide, “upon a plan of action of their own design”. “So, we set goals but we never set standards,” she said.
According to Fawzi, there is no set amount of time for how many life coaching sessions a specific person will require. “It varies a lot, depending on the person, their situation, the nature of their problems and so many other factors,” she said.
Fawzi recalled, however, that during her first experience with life coaching, when she was volunteering with breast cancer survivors, it took a few sessions with one woman to assist her figure out how to resolve a situation that was troubling her. “She was really upset that once she was diagnosed her husband decided to move out of their room; so, I asked her if she wanted to ask him about the reason; she had not thought about asking him,” Fawzy recalled. She said once the wife went to the husband with the question, she was really comforted because he told her he was just unsure of what to do and he would not want to be there if she did not want him to be there or if she felt uncomfortable about his being there. Fawzi recounted that after this chat, the concerned lady was overjoyed to see that everything had returned to normal.
Young men and women and breast cancer survivors are among the groups who would benefit most from life counseling, according to Fawzi. “This is why it might be purposeful for schools and for some clinics and hospitals to offer life-coaching services to help students, especially at their teens, and women or men recovering from serious illness to find their goals and work to achieve them,” she argued.
According to Fawzi, life coaching has occasionally assisted people in recognising the onset of problems that called for psychotherapy. In other instances, it has assisted people in making decisions such as whether to take up sports, seek the advice of a dietician, or simply change careers.
Also according to Fawzi, middle-aged people can also benefit from life coaching, especially if they have concerns about the quality of their previous phases of life and are close to retirement. “It does help, even if it is not a long-term scheme as we sometimes do life-coaching retreats of a few days for specific groups”.
Meanwhile, Fawzi noted that life-coaching is not strictly about resolving problems. “It could well be about having big ambitions and wanting to get these ambitions achieved,” she said. “Athletes are among the groups who benefit from life-coaching; [prominent soccer player] Mohamed Salah has often spoken about how he personally benefited from life-coaching,” she added.
Companies that employ executive coaches do so because they recognize the need for coaching to assist improve performance, “which is different from life-coaches,” to inspire their employees and encourage sluggish performers to achieve more.
Fawzi noted that some people still choose life coaching as a way to enhance the quality of their relationships and their life in general, even when they don't have any major issues or lofty goals. “Again, a life-coach is not a therapist or psychologist that you go to with specific traumas or symptoms of disturbance,” she said.
The key to good life-coaching, Fawzi argued, is “essentially the chemistry” that would make a particular individual comfortable with a particular life-coach. “We ask at the end of the session if it was purposeful and if things do not go well, we usually refer to another life-coach,” she said.
Any life coach who has received training and certification, in Fawzi's opinion, is qualified to work with anyone who requests assistance, but if things don't go according to plan, it's time to recommend the client to a different life coach. “Personally, I took up life-coaching because it was for me a way of helping people and of having a good impact on their lives; if I feel I am not getting there with any one individual I will have to ask them to get someone else to be with them,” she said.
Fawzi, who is in her 50s, has a degree in economics and is a diplomat's wife. She liked teaching as a temporary position. According to her, a teacher should assist students in using their curricula to help them pick what they want to do next rather than simply guiding them through the curriculum. It might be compared to life coaching in this way. “It is about reaching out really – without imposing anything,” she said.
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