Could You Become a Human Experience Specialist?

We are thrilled to be previewing the Human Experience Specialist Certification Course that launches in October. 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 several weeks, I’ve been describing a new kind of helping role. We’ve looked at helping the whole person, cultivating wisdom, conducting Human Experience conversations, practicing accompaniment, and asking questions that can open new possibilities. Eventually these ideas raise a more personal question: Who might actually want to do this work?

The answer isn’t limited to people who already belong to a helping profession. Certainly, coaches, counselors, therapists, social workers, educators, clergy, consultants, and other professionals may recognize something familiar in the Human Experience Specialist role. They are already having conversations about difficult choices, relationships, identity, meaning, purpose, and change. For them, Human Experience work may represent a broadening of what they already do and a new framework for understanding it.

But there is another group I find equally interesting: people who have somehow become helpers without ever deciding to become one. They are the people friends call when a marriage is falling apart, a career has collapsed, a parent has died, or life has stopped making sense. They listen well. They are curious about people. They don’t panic when conversations become difficult. Others seem to trust them with things they don’t readily tell anyone else.

Perhaps you are one of those people.

That doesn’t automatically mean you should become a Human Experience Specialist. Being sympathetic or a good listener isn’t sufficient preparation for helping professionally. Human Experience work requires knowledge, discipline, boundaries, judgment, and practical skills. It requires learning when to ask a question and when to remain quiet, when to challenge and when to accompany, when to suggest an experiment and when to recognize that someone needs a different kind of professional help.

But certain inclinations matter. You may be drawn to this work if you are deeply curious about how human beings work. You may find yourself reading psychology, philosophy, biography, literature, or books about creativity, relationships, spirituality, personality, or meaning not because you have to, but because the human predicament fascinates you. You may have accumulated life experience that has made you less certain of easy answers and more interested in good questions.

You may also feel constrained by existing helping categories. Perhaps you are a coach who sometimes encounters clients whose concerns can’t be reduced to goals and action plans. Perhaps you are a therapist who wants room for conversations that aren’t organized around symptoms and treatment. Perhaps you are an educator, artist, consultant, or other professional who has discovered that the most important part of your work sometimes happens when the official work stops and a real human conversation begins.

Or perhaps you are contemplating a second act. You have spent decades accumulating experience, surviving difficulties, making mistakes, learning about yourself and other people, and becoming wiser in ways no résumé records. You would like to put some of that hard-won understanding to use, but you don’t want to spend years training for a traditional clinical profession.

The Human Experience Specialist role may offer another possibility.

The important question isn’t “Am I already wise enough?” No one is. Nor is it “Do I know how to solve other people’s problems?” That isn’t the job. A better question might be: Am I interested enough in human beings to keep learning about them and willing enough to accompany them into the places where life becomes complicated?

If the answer is yes, Human Experience work may be worth exploring. Next week, I’ll bring these ideas together and describe more fully the emerging role of the Human Experience Specialist—and the new certification program designed to prepare people to do this work.

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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