Few people dream as children of becoming a coach when they grow up. The clichés run to more glamorous, limelight-stealing jobs, like movie star, or rap singer, or President. As a shy, awkward kid I wanted to be a writer because I loved the world of books and thought that creating those little universes would be the coolest thing possible.

I did become a writer; I never thought of becoming a coach too. But growing up a pattern established itself that would inevitably lead to coaching. It’s easy to see in retrospect, but at the time life was just chaotic and frightening.

What was this (chaotic, scary) pattern?

My sister was born 10 months and 19 days before I was. We were like twins from the outset. We shared a crib, and huddled together for warmth because my dad was military at the time and the walls of the base housing in New England were paper-thin and we could see our breath when we exhaled.

We spoke an imaginary language together before we learned to speak English. It was only a few hundred words, and I’ve sadly forgotten most of it now, but my first word in English that I got credit for was “hat,” which was actually “hath,” our word for “head.” I was wearing a little hat at the time, so the mistake was understandable, since I was pointing to my head.

My parents were a bit worried, I think, because my sister and I had shown no signs of speaking English. So they enthusiastically embraced “hath” as close enough to “hat” to be credible. I gradually left our imaginary world behind for English and more ordinary ways of communicating.

And there was another reason to worry. You see, my sister had been born with birth defects, and very early on showed the signs of mental illness that made her life a misery for virtually all of her 50 years until her death a few years ago.

I was her translator. I did my best to explain the world to her, and her to the world. The result was very early practice in entering the mind of someone else, seeing things from her (in this case crazy) point of view, and trying to bridge the gap between that mind and the reality out there.

As we grew up, her worldview became more distorted and paranoid, and it became more and more difficult to connect her to the world and the world to her. In the end, I failed, and she died without having been healed or even reconciled to a reality that failed her in so many ways.

Today I’m a coach because helping people realize their visions and connecting them with the world has been a part of my psychic makeup since childhood. Then, too, clients are easy because they’re so sane. Relatively speaking.

And each successful relationship maybe goes a little way toward repairing that one that I never can repair, that never could be repaired, that was beyond my help, that broke my heart.