  |
|
 |
"What is the point of this story? The thought that life could be better is, I believe, one of the most perfect expressions of what motivates us to continually look for ways to improve ourselves and the circumstances of our lives. Paul Simon wrote the lines above in 1981. Poets, novelists, and songwriters throughout history have certainly concurred with his assertion that this belief is woven into our hearts. And in recent years, many cognitive philosophers and evolutionary biologists who study the workings of the human mind would no doubt agree with the idea that it is woven into our brains as well. The thought that life could be better is the bedrock of my philosophy as a coach. I take it as a given that, while none of us is capable of attaining a state of perfection, every one of us is capable of continuously improving ourselves, of realizing that indelible desire to keep moving in the direction of that unattainable perfect place. Several core principles underlie the coaching process as I practice it: 1. Each of us has our own unique set of habitual ways of responding to the events of our lives. 2. Self-observation is the essential skill to begin the work of seeing what's possible. 3. Practice is the essential discipline to complete the work of creating what's possible. 5. Self-awareness opens you to the paradox of being "fully engaged, completely nonattached".
1. Each of us has our own unique set of habitual ways of responding to the events of our lives. As infants, we each learn certain ways of communicating with our primary caregivers in order to get our basic needs for food and physical comfort satisfied. These earliest patterns of communication are specifically conditioned to correspond to the emotional signals we receive from our significant others during infancy. Then they are repeated and refined throughout the events of our childhood and adolescence, and by the time we reach adulthood, these habitual ways of responding are, for all practical purposes, automatic. We usually refer to these habitual, automatic response patterns as our "personality". While most of us have some degree of awareness about our personality, we are at the same time unavoidably embedded within it, and thus to some degree at the mercy of our personality. We continually interpret our experiences through our habitual ways of understanding things, and we continually respond to events with our habitual ways of speaking and acting. When we are, so to speak, running on the "automatic pilot" of our personality, it is all too easy to find ourselves passing through repetitive cycles of familiar feelings and actions, day after day, year after year. Things keep working out the same, but often not in the ways we wish for. The risk we all face is that our unique, habitual ways of responding to the events of our lives will prevent us from understanding our experiences in the most realistic and meaningful way possible, and will constrain us from taking actions in the world in the most skillful and effective manner possible. 2. Self-observation is the essential skill to begin the work of seeing what's possible. From time to time, most of us receive feedback about ourselves, either informally from friends and family, or more formally from professional colleagues and associates. These opportunities to see what others observe about us can serve as invitations for us to change certain aspects of ourselves, and thus they are can be somewhat useful. Self-observation differs from feedback in a way that is crucial for the coaching process. Self-observation is a self-engaging activity that produces insight, an understanding of some truth about ourselves that comes from within, and thus has a high likelihood of being relevant and accurate. Feedback is a passively received bit of information about ourselves that must pass through the lens of our personality, like any other experience that we have, and so can easily be rendered less relevant and less accurate in the process. As your coach, I won't offer you feedback. Instead, in our coaching sessions, I will help you stay focused on what you are able to observe about yourself, and I'll call your attention to any attempts you make to dilute the relevancy and accuracy of what you're observing. We will use our conversations as opportunities for you to continually exercise and sharpen your skills at observing yourself and the ways in which you habitually respond to the events of your life. From the insights that emerge from this self-observation, you will begin to see what's possible -- what could be different, and better, in your life if you were to change some of those habitual ways of responding. Becoming a skilled observer of yourself is the first, critical step in your process of discovering what's possible for yourself. 3. Practice is the essential discipline to complete the work of creating what's possible.
The insights that come with skillful self-observation are often
surprising, sometimes astonishing. It can seem as if you're seeing your
true self for the first time. Like the proverbial answer to the query "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?", you must practice, practice, practice your new ways of responding, or they will never be a match for the old ones that are so familiar from a lifetime of habit. Therefore, once your self-observation skills are in place and producing useful insights about your habitual ways of responding, we will spend time in every coaching session devising personal practices for you to engage in on a daily basis. These practices emerge from the insights of your self-observation exercises, and support you in the task of making your new ways of responding as "automatic" as your old ways used to be. Practice is how you continually expand your range of responses, and create new and better outcomes for yourself. 4. Our coaching relationship will eventually reach completion; your process of deepening self-awareness continues on. In my first session with every new client, I begin by pointing out that no matter how rich and insightful a conversation we may have in the next 30 minutes or so, the total duration of our coaching session is but a tiny segment of the time that will pass in the client's life in the week ahead. Absent a strong commitment to staying mindful of self-observation and practice on a 24/7 basis after each coaching session ends, our once-a-week coaching conversations cannot have a lasting impact in your day-to-day life. So, in each of our coaching sessions, we maintain a dual focus -- looking both at what is occurring in the here-and-now of today's conversation, and at what is (or is not) occurring for you in the rest of your world outside the coaching. The work we do in each session -- sharpening your self-observation skills, practicing new ways for you to respond to events -- is training for the way of life you intend to follow once the coaching is complete. As you continue with the practices we design in the coaching, you become more and more skillful in living and responding from this deeper self-awareness you have been cultivating. More and more, your new patterns of response are available to you; less and less, you old habitual ways show up. Your outcomes are more in line with your hopes and expectations. That indelible desire in your heart and your mind for life to be better has, to some extent, been realized. At this point, you know that you are ready to let go of the structure of coaching, because the process of the coaching -- continually deepening your self-awareness -- is now an essential and ongoing feature of your everyday life. 5. Self-awareness opens you to the paradox of being "fully engaged, completely nonattached".
One of the more interesting challenges on
the path of deepening self-awareness is the realization that, even when
you are successful in making personal changes that allow you to produce
more of the outcomes you want for yourself, there is always some residue
of dissatisfaction, some new wanting that you weren't even aware of before
you had achieved these new desired outcomes.
|
|
|
|