Personal and career coaching used to be the sole privilege of executives and leaders of large organisations. Now you can’t throw a stone without hitting a life coach, and that is because more and more people are deciding to use them to get themselves unstuck.
I love coaching! I love coaching because I love people! I’m a behaviourist, and nothing on this green earth shocks me or makes me look at a person with anything other than a warm heart for their struggles. Often the biggest struggles they face is that of their judgement of themselves (more about that in a bit).
I know who is coming to me in order to change their lives and who’s looking for another outlet for their habitual attention seeking, I’m ‘Harry Potter Sorting Hat’ good at spotting which is which. There is a reason most coaches don’t charge for the initial consultation and that is because coaching is a relationship and we both need to believe that it is going to work before agreeing to go on the journey together. I work for the love of my job now and nothing else, and so I only take on clients who really wish to make changes in their lives. In my heart I need to be rooting for them, wishing them well and gently helping them to see themselves and the situations they face in a more balanced way. Everything I say is said from a loving space and is designed to help people grow, because when people believe that you wish nothing but the best for them, then they tend to trust you in the times when they cannot trust themselves.
And now for that stuff about creating our own reality, judging ourselves and finding ourselves lacking. An acquaintance of ours had used drugs and alcohol recreationally for most of their life, but at one point their usage escalated and had caused a problem for them at work. It was no coincidence that the situation had worsened in direct correlation with the illness and subsequent passing of their mother. You see they were riddled with shame and guilt for so many things, every pound borrowed and never repaid, nights flaked out, vomiting on the floor, in fact, for every worry they had ever put her through.
We had met a few days after they had been suspended from work. We were both at a party thrown by a mutual friend and as the night moved into the wee hours we found ourselves by the firepit alone, most of the others having gone inside to get away from the midges. As we spoke, a lot of the shame and guilt they felt, poured out. As the talking went on, they began to speak of their mother’s strength, and of the encouragement she had given them throughout their life. They described a person who believed in them and held onto hope for them while they were unable to hold onto it for themselves. She would speak to them, not about how they were lacking, but rather about their intelligence and their potential. Their mother did not forge this chain of shame and disappointment for them, they did that for themselves and now in her name, they were wearing it like the hair-shirt of a penitent man.
It is not the spectre of the past that haunts the present, it is our ability to get up each day and write the same life scripts over and over again that keeps it with us. We think about all that is wrong and all that could go wrong, and then it’s Lights Camera Action as we project this thinking onto the screen of our consciousness. The only way to stop the cycle? Shout CUT! Dump the script and get into Improv. The wellbeing reset built into the human system will take care of the rest.
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