When Reading about Stoicism isn’t Enough

How coaching can help you put your philosophy into practice

Many people come to Stoicism through books, quotations, podcasts, or online articles. That can be a very good beginning. Sooner or later, though, most of us discover that understanding Stoic ideas is not the same as being able to apply them when we are stressed and under pressure. That is where one-to-one coaching can sometimes help.

I began my training in counselling and psychotherapy around three decades ago, after completing my first degree in philosophy. Since then, I’ve been exploring ways to combine philosophy and therapy, through books such as How to Think Like a Roman Emperor and How to Think Like Socrates, and also through my coaching practice.

The clients I work with, typically through weekly or bi-weekly Google Meet video calls, come from all over the world, and all sorts of different backgrounds. Their goals almost always fall, however, into one of two broad categories:

• Living a more meaningful and fulfilling life, in accord with their core values

• Coping more resiliently with stress, and emotions such as anger, sadness, or anxiety

For many years, as a psychotherapist in the UK, I specialized in the treatment of clinical anxiety disorders but in recent years I’ve become more interested in helping people with anger. I work with a wide variety of men and women, though, from different backgrounds, who are dealing with a variety of other problems.

In this article, I’m going to briefly explain a bit more about how Stoicism can be employed in coaching. At the end, I have provided details on how you can contact me if you’re interested in booking a session.

Stoicism in Coaching

It would be easy to write a whole book about Stoicism and coaching, or to talk about it for days and days, because it’s such a rich subject, but I’ll keep it brief here by just focusing on two key concepts, which correspond with the areas I mentioned above: your life values and emotional resilience.

Life Values

People are often drawn to Stoicism because of the emphasis it places on the cardinal virtues: wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Underlying that, though, there’s a profound philosophical insight about the nature of motivation. Stoicism, like other ancient “virtue ethics”, makes a sharp distinction between the value we place on our own character traits (virtues) and the value we place on external “goods”, which Epictetus glosses as “health, wealth, and reputation”. We can choose to act more consistently in accord with our core character-based values, from moment to moment, but whether or not we achieve external success is always partly in the hands of fate.

We find a remarkably similar distinction, between different types of values, at the heart of modern evidence-based psychotherapy. Research has now confirmed that people who suffer from clinical depression tend to place a disproportionate amount of emphasis on external outcomes, in the future, and to forget about the value they can derive, each moment, from their own actions. It’s natural to work toward external goals but if we lose sight of our own character, life can begin to feel empty and devoid of real meaning. The same issue can affect other emotions, for instance, if we worry more about what other people think of us rather than asking whether our current actions are aligned with our values, we can end up with nothing but anxiety.

Coaching, one to one, provides an excellent way to reflect on, and clarify your goals and values, and track how consistently your actions each day align with them. If you’re only concerned about “What ifs” and the future, it’s difficult to keep yourself grounded in the reality of the here and now, which is our natural home, and locus of control. Connecting with your values, in the right way, can make life more enriching, and solve a number of emotional problems, by putting you back in the driving seat, rather than allowing “other stuff” to take over your life. Stoicism teaches us how to get our lives back on track by studying our own values more carefully, from a philosophical perspective.

Emotional Resilience

The pioneer of cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT), Albert Ellis, taught a passage from the Stoic Handbook of Epictetus to all of his clients. We can probably say this is the most famous Stoic quote of all.

People are not disturbed by events, but by their opinions about them. — Enchiridion, 5

That’s the foundation of what we call the “cognitive” theory of emotion today. However, there’s another passage at the beginning of the Handbook, which I find equally important.

Straightaway then practise saying to every troubling impression, “You are just an impression, and not entirely what you appear to be.” — Enchiridion, 1

The Stoics believed that strong emotions, such as fear and anxiety, can take over when we allow ourselves to identify certain impressions we have with reality. Today, psychologists call these impressions “automatic thoughts”, and the process of becoming trapped in them is often called “cognitive fusion”. When we become angry or afraid, for instance, we get the impression that something bad is going to happen, or has already harmed us. We then fuse that idea so tightly with reality, that we begin to take it for granted, for a while, without slowing down to examine whether it could be clouding our judgment and leading us into deeper problems.

It’s not necessarily even that our initial thoughts or impressions are false, in the conventional sense, but rather that we accept them too inflexibly, especially when they contain strong value judgments that evoke powerful emotions. If I get the impression that someone doesn’t like me, it’s possible I could be mistaken. Even if I’m right, though, I may risk falling into the trap of treating their criticism of me as “AWFUL” and “UNBEARABLE”, my emotions making me forgetful that these are my own subjective evaluations. Other people, perhaps wisely, might judge the same situation to be merely unfortunate but not awful, and as difficult but not unbearable.

The perspective of a life coach, and the teachings of Stoicism and modern psychology, can help us to gain perspective on our own emotions. We can train ourselves to pause and examine troubling impressions, as Epictetus advised. We now know that the ability to separate thoughts from facts can not only help reduce the intensity of certain emotions but also provides us with greater psychological flexibility, which means that we will tend to engage in more constructive problem-solving, and make better decisions over time. This comes from developing our ability to think clearly, and look at the bigger picture, rather than allowing fear and anger to hold us captive.

Interested in One-to-One Coaching?

I currently have a few openings for one-to-one coaching over the next few weeks. Have you struggled to apply Stoicism or CBT to problems such as anger, anxiety, stress, procrastination, or relationship conflicts? Coaching with me may be suitable if you are dealing with these kinds of problems, or if you have reached a point in life where you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or unsure how to move forward.

In practice, coaching usually involves clarifying the problem you want to work on, identifying the thoughts, emotions, and ways of coping that potentially keep it going, and then developing practical strategies to help you respond differently in daily life.

If you are interested in working with me, please get in touch and let me know what you would like help with:

I’ll reply with more information about my current availability, fees, and the next steps for booking an initial session. Note: Because I only see coaching clients on a limited number of days each week, I can only take on a small number of new clients at a time.

Best wishes,