Why I became a coach

Why I do this work

I grew up watching my mother live with a difficult man for 54 years. My father was angry and unhappy, and his unhappiness filled our home. We never knew what mood he would be in when he came home from work. My mother spent much of those years losing herself to keep the marriage going, and I watched what that cost her.

I wanted to understand why he couldn't stop living like that. I could see what it did to my mom, and I wanted to understand why she stayed. Those questions are what led me to this work.

For more than 30 years, I studied psychology and what helps people to change. I studied with leading psychologists and coaches, attended numerous workshops, and read hundreds of books.

That's why I help people recognize where keeping someone else happy has come at the expense of their own life, and begin to change that. I bring compassion for how they got there and honesty about what staying in those patterns is costing them.

What I didn't see in myself

For a long time, I thought being nothing like my father meant I'd escaped my parents' dynamic. I didn't recognize how much I'd taken on my mother's role, keeping the peace and putting my own needs aside to make relationships work. I was the giver, the easygoing one who never needed much. The nice guy.

I didn't get how much of my identity depended on being needed, and I didn't really know who I was when no one needed anything from me. Getting honest about that was hard, because I had to see what all that giving was doing for me. It kept me safe and gave me a sense of worth. And because it looked like generosity, it was easy to avoid seeing the fear underneath it.

There was a self-righteousness in it, too. Being the one who gave more let me think of myself as the good one, and made it easier to blame the other person for what wasn't working between us.

That's when I understood that losing yourself isn't just a woman's story. We men do it too.

It's being the nice guy who never says no, never asks for much, and always finds a way to make things easier for everyone else. You're the provider, the fixer, the one people count on, even when you're exhausted. You keep your feelings to yourself because having needs of your own threatens your idea of being the good guy.

The giving can be sincere, but it can also come with an unspoken bargain. If you're helpful enough, agreeable enough, generous enough, the other person is supposed to appreciate you, stay happy with you, and give you the love you haven't asked for directly. You get to feel like the good guy while trying to influence how they feel and behave, often without admitting to yourself that's what you're doing.

Understanding why someone else behaves the way they do can only take you so far. At some point, you have to turn that attention toward yourself and take ownership of your life. You can't make their choices for them, but you can get honest about your own. What is happening to me here? Why am I accepting it? What do I want? What am I afraid will happen if I choose myself?

Your life will really change when you stop making everyone else's happiness more important than your own.

What the wisest teachers in the world taught me

People at the end of their lives are the wisest teachers in the world. They have a perspective you don't get until you're there, when running out of time makes it brutally clear what mattered and what didn't.

For ten years, my partner was a hospice nurse. She came home with stories about people at the end of their lives seeing with brutal clarity what had mattered and what hadn't.

One man told her to get rid of her "gonnas." He was gonna take his wife to Europe, gonna spend more time with his children, gonna do all kinds of things. And now he was out of time.

Again and again, the regrets she heard were about the life someone had meant to live but hadn't. Living the way someone else expected. Never saying what they actually felt. Letting the people who really mattered disappear.

The most important relationship in your life

People come to me for all kinds of reasons, but underneath many of them is the same problem. They've spent so much time trying to keep other people happy that they've lost touch with themselves. Sometimes it's a marriage, but it can just as easily be a parent, a sibling, a grown child, a friendship, or a lifetime of worrying about what everyone else thinks. Sooner or later, the work turns toward the relationship they have with themselves.

You're not responsible for someone else's behavior, but you are responsible for deciding what you'll accept and what you'll do next. That means getting honest about the bargains you've been making. Maybe you keep quiet to avoid an argument, make yourself indispensable so you feel secure, or ask for less so you don't risk hearing no. It means looking at what you've been tolerating, what you've been avoiding, what you've been afraid to say, and what you've been getting from staying the way you are.

Many of those patterns began for good reasons. They helped you belong, stay safe, feel valuable, or keep relationships you couldn't afford to lose. The problem is that a strategy that once protected you can become a way of abandoning yourself. The work is getting honest about what those patterns are costing you now, and learning to make different choices.

I'll help you understand what's driving your choices, including the fears and emotions underneath them, so you can decide what you want to do instead of letting fear decide for you.

Every person I've ever coached has shared the same underlying struggle with self-acceptance and self-compassion. When they begin to offer themselves the same acceptance, care, and compassion they give to others, everything in their life changes. They begin to show up authentically, without apology, knowing that their value is never in question. The changes I've seen are nothing short of amazing. Following this little rule will help you get there.

"Doug has this rule he calls Rule Number One: you're number one, take care of yourself first, love yourself first. It sounded selfish at first. Then I began to realize that most of the problems in my relationship were happening because I wasn't taking care of myself first." — Robert H.