Lemon juice
If you’re familiar with lemon juice, you’ll know it as a relatively pleasant, basically harmless citrus fruit juice used for all sorts of things. It means nothing to get it on your hands, except for maybe some stickiness. If you had a cut on your hand however, you’d know this same otherwise pleasant, otherwise harmless liquid as a fire sword from hell.
I heard a recovery speaker once liken this to the relationship between the past and present. My wife asks me a harmless question about if I’d taken the dog out yet, and suddenly the alarms in my head are going off. Instead of ‘did you take the dog out yet?’ I hear: you’re a shitty partner, the dog is about to pee everywhere, and it’s your fault we can’t have nice things. Where’d all this come from? The cuts on my hands.
Experiences beget thoughts, which harden into beliefs over time. Sometimes we don’t even know how they got there, but they constantly color our current thinking and interpretations. Some are productive and helpful, and others – the “cuts” – are unproductive and harmful.
Coaches don’t spend much time in the past (a therapist probably would) but will dip into it when relevant, especially to help expose limiting beliefs.
We tell ourselves stories all day. Mine are informed by my experience – family, circumstances and events, culture, social media, etc. – and yours are by yours. My stories are Matt’s stories. Your stories are your stories. We tend to accept these stories as fact and rarely challenge them on our own. Coaching provides space between these stories and you, so you have an opportunity to view them objectively and actually decide if they are true and useful OR if they’re false, exaggerated, or unproductive. These are conditions for breakthrough thinking. And then – together – we work on a replacement thought that better serves you.
Quick check in: how are the cuts on your hands healing? and how might they be holding you back from things you really want?
Coaching is an investment in your attitude and outlook just as much as your actions. Thoughts you once knew as decades-old facts will take some time – and convincing – to get rid of, so it’s important that the replacement thoughts are both useful and believable to you. If they aren’t believable, you don’t use them. If you don’t use them, nothing changes. We’ll work on this together, too.
If we could easily do this ourselves, we would, and most of us would be living our dream lives, unhindered by limiting thinking and not hypersensitive to innocuous questions. I could hear “did you take the dog out yet?” and hear did you take the dog out yet? That’s it. A fact-finding question instead of a judgement.
Coaching doesn’t have a monopoly on self-reflection. At the right time, reading a book, hearing a song, or having a conversation can trigger this. But self-reflection is the bedrock of a good coaching conversation. The process is built right into the fabric. So you can wait for that song to hit your playlist at the right time, or you can get into it now.
If you’re ready to take the plunge I’m here for you – go ahead and schedule a free consultation so we can discuss, or keep learning about coaching on my site.