We are thrilled to be previewing the Human Experience Specialist Certification Course that launches in this month. Join the inaugural cohort and become one of the world’s first Human Experience Specialists. Curious what this means? Come take a look!
Over the past weeks, I’ve been making the case for a new kind of helper. We began with a simple observation: people frequently need help with experiences that aren’t illnesses, aren’t disorders, and don’t fit neatly into categories. They are struggling with relationships, identity, meaning, creativity, difficult choices, unwanted transitions, aging, disappointment, uncertainty, and the countless other challenges that come with being human.
I have proposed calling the person prepared to enter those conversations a Human Experience Specialist.
The name is intentionally broad. A Human Experience Specialist doesn’t specialize in anxiety, relationships, careers, creativity, or meaning. The specialization is human experience itself. That means trying to understand the whole person rather than reducing that person to a presenting problem, diagnosis, goal, or circumstance.
This is an ambitious undertaking. To work this way, an HES needs a broad understanding of human nature. They need to think intelligently about personality, identity, meaning, purpose, motivation, relationships, freedom, responsibility, creativity, habits, self-deception, aging, loss, hope, despair, and change. They need psychological acuity without imagining that every human difficulty is a psychological disorder.
They also need practical skills. Over the course of the past weeks, we’ve looked at several of them. We’ve considered accompaniment: remaining alongside another person without taking over their life. We’ve explored quality questions: questions capable of interrupting old assumptions and opening new possibilities. We’ve looked at the movement between understanding and action, including the use of life experiments that allow people to learn something by trying something.
But underneath these skills lies something larger. I have called it wisdom. Wisdom in this context doesn’t mean knowing how another person should live. It means becoming a serious student of human nature while remaining humble about what we can know about any particular human being. The wise helper brings experience and understanding into the room but doesn’t turn either into authority over someone else’s life.
That combination—breadth, wisdom, practical skill, curiosity, humility, and respect for another person’s agency—is at the heart of Human Experience work. And now we are ready to teach it.
This October, in partnership with Noble Manhattan Coaching, we will launch the Human Experience Specialist Certification Course, a comprehensive training program for people who want to develop this new helping identity and learn how to practice it.
The program is designed both for existing helpers who want to broaden their work and for people who may be entering the helping professions by a different door. Coaches, therapists, counselors, educators, consultants, creative professionals, clergy, mentors, and others may find that Human Experience work gives a name and a framework to conversations they are already having. People contemplating a second-act helping career may discover a way to put decades of accumulated life experience and hard-won wisdom to meaningful use.
The aim is not to produce people who believe they have answers to life’s problems. It is almost the opposite. We want to develop helpers capable of entering complicated human situations without prematurely reducing, diagnosing, fixing, or simplifying them. We want practitioners who can listen broadly, think deeply, ask excellent questions, offer useful perspectives, devise thoughtful experiments, recognize their limits, and stay alongside another person when no quick solution exists.
Initially, I asked, “What if people need a different kind of help?” Now I would put the proposition more strongly. I think they do.
Our lives have become more fluid, less prescribed, and in many ways more difficult to navigate. Old certainties about identity, work, relationships, community, purpose, and how a life ought to unfold have weakened. That freedom creates possibilities, but it also leaves many people trying to make consequential decisions without a reliable map.
They don’t need someone to tell them where to go. They need someone trained to help them find their way. That is the promise of the Human Experience Specialist. And this October, we’ll begin training the first generation.
Don’t miss your chance to be a part of the first ever cohort of Human Experience Specialists. There is a HUGE early bird savings available for early registrants. Make sure to take a look!
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