With my final blog concerning the reasons that people don’t seek coaching, I’ve decided to address the most common one. It is also the truest:
“Coaching won’t work for me.”
I’ve heard it a lot and the funny thing is that I always surprise people when I tell them that they’re absolutely right. I think it’s easiest to see why this is the case when you put it into a Thought Model.
(Click here if you need a reminder about how the Thought Model works.)
- C(ircumstances): You hear about an opportunity to work with a life coach to address something you’d like to improve in your life.
- T(houghts): Coaching won’t work for me.
- F(eelings): Hopelessness
- A(ctions): You don’t engage in the opportunity. You find reasons why it’s not the right fit for you. You look for external factors that you’d rather blame for your problem (see last week’s blog). You tell yourself that you don’t need the help, you can do it on your own.
- R(esults): Coaching doesn’t work for you because you never try it and you remain right where you are.
Thoughts like this are self-fulfilling prophecies. When you tell yourself that something won’t work for you, it won’t. It doesn’t mean that it couldn’t work for you if you gave it the opportunity. In situations like this, it is actually your belief that prevents you from getting the results you want.
This extends to any thoughts you have that define who you are as a person. Let me give you an example:
Many of my clients want to get more organized. They feel like their lives are out of their control. They describe entire days and weeks that go by where they don’t know where the hours went. They have things they’d like to make time for, but it just doesn’t happen. They tell me, “I’m just not a very organized person.”
You know what, they’re right.
Now, the reason they’re not organized has nothing to do with some sort of genetic defect that prevents them from getting their shit together. They’re not organized because they think that they’re not. When you think you’re not organized, you tend to feel disorganized. I don’t know about you, but I don’t typically take actions that help me organize my life from a place of feeling disorganized.
These clients have often invested countless hours and dollars into organizational systems, but, despite that, they continue to struggle. The reason they do is because they continue to believe that they’re not organized people. No organizational system will work if you don’t believe you can get organized. What we work on in coaching is changing that core belief.
One of my favorite questions to ask my clients is “what if that wasn’t true?” What would change in your life if you were wrong about that belief? What if you believed that you are an organized person? How would that change things?
I encourage my clients to take time to do this for all their “I am” statements. We learn very early on how to define ourselves, but those beliefs can be incredibly limiting and, remember, they are only thoughts that we’ve simply thought so many times that we now believe them to be true.
Let’s go back to our initial example. What if you’re wrong when you think that coaching won’t work for you? What if working with a coach would get you the exact results you want? If you knew that you’d achieve your goal, would you sign up?
I’d love to help you explore this more. Start by signing up for my free course How To Feel Better On Your Next Shift and then feel free to email me at hello @unicorndoctor.com when you’re ready to learn more.
