Becoming the Person Before You Need To Be
by Matt Thieleman
A few years ago, before my wife Kristen and I were married, we were in the conversation about kids. I was ready. So I asked her — "What do you need, to be ready?"
She said: "I need to see and do everything."
She braced for me to push back. Instead I said, "Great, where are we going?"
That conversation turned into a year and a half of planning, which led to a camper van we named Babs, which in turn led to four months of traveling across the western US and Canada after packing everything we owned in a five-by-ten storage unit. Kristen quit her job. I kept coaching from the road. We saw what we set out to see.
Here's the funny thing about being a yes to our desires and making the impossible happen.
A week into the trip, Kristen turned to me and said, "Okay. I'm ready to have kids. I just needed to know we could do this."
The trip wasn't actually about seeing everything. It was about becoming the kind of couple who could keep adventuring once kids were in the picture — who wouldn't let parenthood collapse the size of our life. Once she'd become that person, the original need released. We didn't have to do the whole thing. (Of course, doing the whole thing was incredible and life-changing in its own way, so obviously not a waste! And we didn't immediately start trying to get pregnant.) The becoming was the thing.
This is one of the lessons I get to watch over and over in my coaching work. So much of what we want isn't actually the thing we say we want. It's who we'd have to be to have it, and what we imagine having it will create for us. And once we become that person, life has a way of bringing us even more.
The impossible isn't usually a logistics problem
I tell my clients that our job, together, is to support them in creating what feels impossible. If everything they wanted was already possible to them, they'd have it.
The impossible thing might be money. It might be the relationship with the parent who never softened. It might be saying no to a friend without losing them. It might be feeling at home in your own body for the first time in twenty years.
What I've learned is that the gap between possible and impossible is rarely about logistics. We had no idea how to live in a van. We didn't know the routes, the campgrounds, the mechanics, how to stay calm when our CV boot blew up outside of Banff (only one of the van mishaps we encountered). None of that was in us before we left.
It all came on the trip.
Which means before we left, the trip really was impossible. We weren't yet the people who could take it. We had to put ourselves in the situation and let the situation make us.
For the people I work with, the move is the same. You can't think your way into being someone you haven't yet been. You have to do something that requires you to become that person, and then catch yourself becoming.
Change is moment by moment
I'm someone who has always had big visions. I want every founder in the world to have a coach. I want a community of thirty thousand people practicing coaching together so the world gets a little more conscious. I'm wired for the moonshot.
What I've learned, mostly the hard way, is that some of those big visions were a trauma response. A way of not being in my body, not being in my actual life, not being with the small thing in front of me. The future was somewhere I could hide.
A lot of my work over the last few years has been learning to hold both. The vision AND the body. The big thing AND this conversation. Because the actual mechanism of change isn't the vision. The vision points the direction. The change happens through one moment, one choice, one slightly courageous thing said out loud, and then another, and then another.
Most of those moments don't feel big enough to matter. The little voice says, this is nothing, why bother. But if you keep choosing into it, that's how a life moves.
What I think the work actually is
I used to think coaching was about helping people get what they want. Now I think it's something quieter (and much bigger) than that.
When I watch a client really shift — not the surface change, the real one — what's happening is that they're feeling more safe inside their own body and mind, and by virtue of that, in the world. The new relationship, the new business, the new boundary, all of that comes with it. But the thing underneath is that they stopped being at war with themselves.
For those of us who do this work — coaches, therapists, healers, anyone in a helping seat — I think that's the through-line. We aren't here to engineer outcomes. At least that's not the type of coaching I do. We're here to walk alongside someone while they become the person who can hold the life they actually want. Sometimes that means reflecting them back to themselves. Sometimes it means staying when they want to push us away. Sometimes it means telling them the truth nobody else will tell them. Whatever energy the moment requires.
It's not fluffy work. Living from your own values is, more often than not, an uphill effort. Saying no to someone you love. Letting yourself be seen when you've spent decades being useful instead. None of that is easy.
But it's the work. And the people I get to do it with — including the healers and coaches reading this — are the ones who keep me believing the world can feel safer.
Become the person first. The rest tends to follow.
Love.
