Life Unlimited

I have been on a few back to back coaching calls this week  – a couple on “Power Tools” and Advanced Coaching.  I have had some real food for thought from all of these and the messages and learnings seem to be connected. 

I am at a halfway point in a contract I took as a way of easing myself out of my comfort zone (full time corporate job) to building a coaching practice and life that I want.   If I am going to help others find their bliss, I think it is important to follow mine!   I have lately really struggled with letting go of this contract, even though I know I have no choice.  Funny thing.  The job has been the best I have ever had and a part of me wants to stay.  I was on a coaching call last night about “UAC’s  – Underlying Automatic Commitments” which basically are the unconscious or conscious behavior or thinking we repeat that get in the way of getting what we want.  We keep these commitments because on some level, we are being rewarded for it.  My resistance is coming from wanting to stay in a comfort zone where I am getting paid regularly, where I am successful without taking much risk, and from the discomfort of not knowing what lays ahead  for me.  I learned that I needed to revisit the reason I took this job in the first place,  why I want to be a coach, why I think I would be good at it.  I realized that these are not things you can just affirm once with yourself and then get on with it.  Every time the gremlin jumps on my back, I need to have this conversation with myself.  This is also powerful for working with a client, to help them examine what thinking, behavior, beliefs they may be holding on to that cause them to repeatedly delay or sabatoge their goals.  I also experienced feelings coming up about my work in HR and found a pattern repeating itself about how I feel about my work and how I perceive other feel about it.  All of this served to renew my comittment to my coaching journey.  I’m scared as hell, and yet I will keep ploughing through.  Another thing that helped this week was hearing from other ICA students and one workshop leader about their own journey.  I am not alone in this.   Everyone struggles with self doubt and fear when they are taking a risk, stepping out of their comfort zone to do something different than they know.  One coach told me that sometimes it’s good to be bad at something.  It means you are pushing your edges.   So I will keep pushing mine and hope I don’t fall over!  

On Monday I called in to a coaching class on Power Tools – my favorite!  We got into an interesting discussion, as usual, about taking action vs delaying action and when it is good to take action or move a client into action and how to overcome delay tactics.  We also talked about how it is sometimes important and valuable to not take action, to be still with ourselves so that we can listen to our inner voice in order to take purposeful action and not “spin our wheels” or become action junkies.  This also lead to a discussion about how we get into the trap of doing all the things we think we should do or have to do, rather than focusing on what we want.  There are so many things out there that we tell ourselves we should do, and then we resist doing them because it feels like an obligation.  I thought about this later on in the evening and what came up for me was how I had been feeling about writing and acting.  I started doing both a few years ago – more acting than writing – as a creative outlet and to pursue a creative dream.  I enjoyed it at first, and then started to feel like I needed to do more in order to make up for all the lost time that I hadn’t done it.  It then began to feel like a burden and the next thing I knew I was cancelling auditions and I stopped journalling and writing.  I’ve been telling myself that maybe I lost interest as I am pursuing other goals but what has really been happening is that I started thinking about writing and acting as something I have to do, should do, because it is my dream and I shouldn’t give up.  Subconsciously I was resisting the thing I wanted because I was telling myself it was something I had to do.  I am now going to revisit this and reconnect with why I want to act and write and be mindful of the thoughts that lead me to feeling like I should do it.  As always, personal learnings about yourself are very powerful tools for bringing into coaching and I have definitely learned a valuable tool for helping clients examine areas of their lives where they are stuck because they tell themselves they have to do something.

No, it isn’t what you think.  Well maybe.  Lots of great speakers and networking opportunities.  Some interesting information and one defining moment.  The conference was actually organized by a good friend of mine who is launching her career as a speaker.  What better way than to dive in and organize your own conference and surround yourself with other well known speakers.  It worked!  She was amazing.  I was really proud of her and what she had done, and I was inspired by the risks she took to put it together.  One of the things she did was to invite 25 women from shelters around Toronto to participate in the conference.  I had an opportunity to meet a number of these women throughout the day and I was really struck by their resilience.  Some felt a little uncomfortable as it was the first time they had participated in such an event.  When the conference was over, I could not stop thinking about the women I had met from the shelter.  I felt drawn to them.  Have you ever had a knowing in your gut about what you wanted or what you knew you needed to do?  I have been pursuing a goal of becoming a coach and have been thinking about the people I would be coaching.   My focus has been on the corporate world, with some individual life and career coaching mixed in, because these are areas I know about.  I wasn’t prepared for the feeling that came up in me after I met these women.  It was like I had this knowing that I wanted to help them and I knew right away that some of my coaching time was going to be devoted to helping women in shelters get back on their feet and start their lives over.  I get excited about it even as I write this.  This is what it feels like to know what you are supposed to do.