This interview with David Luis Glisch-Sánchez, Ph.D. shares how life coaching aligns with living for justice. Recently, David launched Soul Support Life Coaching with focuses on healing and restoring wholeness. I’ve been really excited to witness David share the vision for this work, build the business framework, and begin to offer coaching and workshops. 

David is a sociologist who has spent years both doing self-work and studying how others heal “to make whole,” especially from pain, harm, and trauma. David’s writing and research is connected with their deeper calling as a healer rooted in antiracism, queer, and feminist ethics and guided by and for radical Love. I’ve known that David’s life experience and journey through higher education have impacted their approach to healing and wholeness. And this interview taught me more about the deep commitments guiding this work.

Through this interview, I hope you’ll consider what life coaching might mean for your life. 

If you’d like to connect around this work, consider joining David’s upcoming workshop: “Personal Growth for Social Change” (Thursday, July 28th—and look for workshops in future months). I’ll be joining it, and I’d love to participate alongside you. And I hope you’ll read to learn more about David, Soul Support, and life coaching.

Q&A with David Luis Glisch-Sánchez about Soul Support Life Coaching

1. We’ve both had journeys in and out of higher education, and those journeys have led us both to coaching. What has this journey been like for you? And what’s inspiring Soul Support Life Coaching?

The story of how I came to be a life coach is really a story of my journey to embrace my purpose to be a healer, because that is what my life coaching is: the art and practice of healing.

I connected with this purpose for the first time in a meaningful way when I was doing research for my dissertation, a project about understanding the social dimensions of individually experienced pain. I will be eternally grateful to the 36 Latinx queer folks who sat with me and shared their innermost hurts, fears, dreams, and hopes. Listening to their life stories, and the lessons and wisdom contained therein, changed me in a deep and profound way. I simply have not been the same since. I always say that my Ph.D. is technically in sociology, but what I ended up earning was a graduate degree in understanding pain—how it shapes people, organizations, communities, and countries—and what we need to begin doing individually and collectively to restore wholeness and balance.

Hindsight being 20-20, a tenure-track position at a research university was never going to be a good fit for me. But make it fit, I tried, and tried, and tried. I had given in to what I had internalized should be my career, professional, and life goals. My radical truth, however, is that nothing about the tenure-track (except the teaching) brought me joy, peace, pleasure, or even sparked a sense of curiosity. What I found to be true for myself was that not only did the day-to-day realities of the tenure-track not cultivate these things in my life, but they actively got in the way of activities and practices that did. And this I could no longer abide.

Slowly, but surely, I have gone about the long process of envisioning, developing, and building what is now Soul Support Life Coaching. I have developed this coaching practice to allow me to work with individuals, groups, and communities to prioritize their healing. And for me that simply means helping folks restore a sense of wholeness and completeness in whatever areas of life they may be experiencing imbalance, unfulfillment, stagnation, or dysfunction.

So, what’s inspiring Soul Support Life Coaching? You, me, us, and our collective desire and drive to heal not only ourselves but also each other and, ultimately, our world.

2. I feel really moved by your story and the way you approach coaching. Could you talk a little more about what life coaching is and why someone might work with a life coach? 

The core of life coaching, to me, has always been about providing motivation, encouragement, guidance, and loving accountability to aid a person, group, organization, or community to achieve goals they set for themselves. Life coaching, then, is a space and relationship for identifying practical and critical steps, tools, and practices. It supports you moving consistently and systematically closer to goals.

As the name implies, life coaching can focus quite literally on any part of life, ranging from career, finances, spirituality, and health and wellness to identity development, group and organizational dynamics, and personal and familial relationships. One of the defining characteristics of life coaching, however, is that no matter the area(s) of life you are working in and through, the goals you are trying to achieve are clear and specific.

If you’d like a more detailed description of what the individual coaching process is like with me, I invite you to head here, and learn in detail what it means.

Lastly, I always like to preface, especially for the kind of life coaching I practice, that working with a life coach is no substitute for therapy. That is not to say that coaching cannot be therapeutic, and neither is it an either/or proposition. I’ve benefited from working with multiple therapists, coaches, and healing practitioners–often simultaneously–and hope you will, too. 

3. There are a lot of coaches out there. How do you describe your approach?

There are several critically important characteristics I would use to describe Soul Support Life Coaching:

1) the commitment to practicing anti-racist, queer, and feminist ethics; 
2) tailoring the coaching process and advice to each person I work with; and 
3) a desire to grow the capacity for emotional wisdom in all the folks I coach.

What differentiates Soul Support from many other life coaching practices is my explicit commitment to practicing anti-racist, queer, and feminist ethics not only in the coaching relationship, but in the running of Soul Support as a business. Anti-racism, queerness, and feminism are not mere add-ons to me as a coach or businessperson; rather, they define the very work I do and the kind of human being I labor to be on a consistent basis. Because of these ethical commitments, I fundamentally believe MONEY SHOULD NOT BE A BARRIER, AND LIFE COACHING SHOULD NOT BE A LUXURY. As a result, Soul Support is committed to maximizing accessibility of its services.

In my experience, the best and most effective kinds of coaching are those methods that are tailored to each specific client. I do not believe in a “one-size fits all” or “one-size fits most” approach. As a result, my coaching style and practice firmly believes that the motivation, encouragement, guidance, and loving accountability I provide to clients must be rooted and informed by their specific histories, identities, strengths, and challenges.

Finally, I am committed, as a coach, to help expand the capacity of clients to practice what I call “emotional wisdom” (related to emotional literacies). Simply put, emotional wisdom is what many others refer to as emotional intelligence, but for me emotional intelligence is often meaningless unless it is rooted in an ethics of love and justice. To have an understanding and knowledge of our feelings and the feelings of others is a key first step in healing and wellness, but this knowledge and understanding must be paired with a deep commitment to the practice of love and justice. 

4. So, how can people connect with you?

If you are interested in individual or group/organizational coaching, the best way is to set up a free consultation where we can have a one-with-one conversation to respond to your specific questions and needs. To set up that free consultation, either head over to the website and fill out the online form, or simply send an e-mail to David@soulsupportlifecoaching.com.

Another way to engage Soul Support is to sign up for one of the workshops in the monthly series. July’s workshop is called “Personal Growth for Social Change” and focuses on information and practices that help harness our own self-work to show up and do the collective work of justice, equity, and fairness.  

You can also stay in the know by signing up for the newsletter to receive updates, and follow the practice on social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

5. How does coaching align with everyday living for justice?

Coaching is about becoming the very best versions of ourselves. Whether we recognize it or not, our very best versions are always anti-racist, feminist, and abolitionist. In other words, our best selves are agents and facilitators of justice and equity.

Not all coaching modalities and frameworks are aligned with this truth. Coaches can very easily keep toxic, violent, and harmful beliefs in place that serve the interests of capitalism and other forms of domination. That’s why it’s important to choose a coach wisely—someone who has explicit commitments to and experience with being an agent and facilitator of equity and justice.

As an example, our identities matter to us, they mean something, and they’re usually quite important. Therefore, our identities should matter to and inform how a coach works with and advises a client. In my experience, if you are engaging with all of your clients in the exact same way and giving out the same advice and tools with no attention to their social location, you end up replicating a very toxic and harmful form of colorblind-racism, meritocracy, and bootstraps ideology. Remember, wisdom might be universal, but its application and relevance is not.

And my commitments as a coach, intellectual, healer, small-business operator, and just plain human being is to hold myself, and those around me, to the highest standards of fairness, kindness, and generosity. I know no other way to go about doing this than to firmly, consistently, and persistently practice anti-racist, queer, and feminist ethics.

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This interview is conducted by Beth Godbee, Ph.D. with David Luis Glisch-Sanchez, Ph.D. for Heart-Head-Hands.com. 

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