There is a version of coaching that is mostly about clarity.
You come in, you name what you want, and then you work toward it. I don’t like the title ‘coach’ - but I like that part. Goals and purpose.
Except almost no one who sits across from me believes they are confused about what they want. They can tell me, in specific and sometimes beautiful language, exactly what they are looking for. In a partner. In a career. In a life.
The problem is not the articulation. The problem is the field.
I use that word loosely — field — to mean something like the sum of your energetic attention.
Not your stated values. Not your vision board. Not what you wish you wanted. Not what therapy culture told you was a green flag. Not the words you use in a coaching session.
The field of your life is made of where you actually put your time and attention. What you look at when no one is watching. Who gets the most alive version of you at a party. What you reach for when you are tired or scared or bored. The field is the total of your real investments, and it doesn’t care at all what you say you want.
Often, my job in coaching is to find the difference between what someone says they want and where all of their energetic attention is going. In that gap is the problem.
I watch this most clearly in dating. A woman comes in and tells me exactly what she is looking for in a partner. He is stable. He has integrity. He holds his boundaries. He shows up in a clean way. She is specific and she is serious and I believe her. And then she meets men who are exactly that, and something goes flat. They don’t activate her. They don’t hold her attention the way the other kind does — the kind that requires her constant interpretation, her constant forgiveness, her constant hoping. She doesn’t call those men good. She calls them boring.
Meanwhile, she is pouring her best hours into someone who meets NONE of her stated criteria, and she cannot understand why she keeps arriving at the same place.
I watch the same pattern in male clients. He says he wants a real relationship. A woman who is grounded, who challenges him, who shows up with substance. And he does want that, somewhere. But where his eyes go at a party, what he follows online, what gets his body going — that tells a different story.
The field around you is being fed constantly, and it is being fed the opposite of what he says he’s building toward.
This is not a moral indictment. Really, it isn’t. Because there isn’t a right way to relate or work. You know that if you look around at real people instead of absorbing internet reels.
Also, it is just physics.
The field produces your life. Not your intentions. Not your goals. Not your oral values. Not your projection of what you deserve in the future. Not the things you would say if someone asked you over dinner what matters to you. The field — that accumulation of actual daily attention — is what the universe interprets as your order. And it fills it.
What makes this hard to coach is that most people cannot see their own field. They are inside it. The attention patterns are invisible because they feel like just living — just how things are — not like choices. The man watching certain content online does not think of it as a vote for the kind of intimacy options he will have. The woman spending four hours in her nervous system over a text from someone who is trash for her does not think of it as an investment.
But it is.
It is all investment.
I have learned to stop asking people what they want too early in the work. I have learned to watch instead. To ask myself: where does this person’s energy go day to day? Where does time disappear?
What makes them feel most alive — and is that thing correlated, in any way, with what they told me they were building?
Sometimes the answer is yes, and we are working with an alignment problem — the person knows what they want, they are just not yet internally resourced to pursue it cleanly.
But sometimes, most of the time, the answer is no.
And then I have a harder question to ask, which is: do you actually want this thing you say you want?
Or do you want to want it, which is different. People spend lifetimes trying to create what they think they should want.
Because the field does not lie. The field shows me your real desires before you have language for them, before you have permission for them, before you have made peace with them.
The correction, when it comes, is not dramatic.
It is not about wanting better things or becoming a better person. It is about paying attention to where your attention goes. That is the whole practice. Noticing the field around you. Deciding, deliberately, what you are feeding. Opening to the somatic discomfort that’s been locking you into this pattern.
Understanding that the life you are creating is not the one you describe. It is the one you are building right now, hour by hour, click by click, conversation by conversation.
You are always voting. The question is whether you know what you are voting for.
I write primarily to support my small business, christinaelaine.com
I am a somatic coach, writer, and curriculum creator writing about the interior life of modern relating, weekly on Medium & Substack. I also host interviews on YouTube.