Episode 18: Building A Self-Coaching Practice [Client Lessons #6]

Good morning, everybody, and welcome to The Work Of Becoming podcast! Today is our last day of our Lessons That I’ve Learned From Clients series, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed these episodes. I hope that you learned something regardless of whether or not you are interested in our Alliance Coaching special that we are running this month.

Today, I’m gonna give you the last lesson that I have learned from working with clients, and the client that I’m going to be talking about is actually me. So, today, we are gonna talk about the power of self-coaching. If you don’t know what self-coaching is, self-coaching is when you actually coach yourself through the obstacles you’re experiencing in your life. It’s a skill that a lot of our clients develop in Alliance Coaching so that they can work with us for six months or maybe nine months or maybe a year, but whenever they’re done working with us, they have the skills to continue coaching themselves and being intentional about their behavior after they’re done with us. We always want there to be an off-ramp. We don’t want people to be working with us forever. That’s not our goal.

For me, personally, self-coaching requires me to separate my “client brain” from my “coach brain.” So, I want you to think about how there’s a version inside of you that is the “client.” That is the version of you that’s having the problem. And then there is another version of yourself, another voice inside of you, that is the “problem-solver.” Right now, if you haven’t done a lot of coaching or self-coaching, if you’ve never had a coach, you might not have that problem-solver voice yet or that problem-solver voice might be very, very, very quiet or very subtle or not pop up very often. What I’m here to tell you is that the more you practice intentionally activating that problem-solver voice, that nurturing voice, that caretaker voice, the more it’s going to carry through in your life.

So, I’m gonna give you a tangible, crazy-sounding tip that I do to help myself self-coach. So, here’s what I do. Whenever I’m in the car, I’m driving somewhere, and I’m bored, what I will do is I will start talking out loud as my client-self. I will ask myself the journal question I do every morning which is, “What is wrong with my life,” or, “What is going wrong,” and then I will talk out loud about all the things that are going wrong. And then I will pause. I will let the silence fill the car, and I will shift my brain into my problem-solving brain, my coach brain. I will think back to what I just said out loud, and I will get really, really, really curious about solutions, and I will start to talk out loud as my coach-self, and I will say, “Hey, I’m noticing this. What if you do this? This seems to be a pattern,” and I will problem solve for myself, okay?

Now, going back and forth like that in a car can be very difficult because if you’re feeling a lot of emotions in your problem-self, it can be really difficult to shift into your problem-solving self. So, another slightly easier option that you can do is on a Friday, I want you to brain dump everything that’s going wrong. I want you to brain dump all the problems that you had that week, and I want you to wait the weekend, give it space, and then on Monday, I want you to go through, read what you wrote, and I want you to take another pen and respond to it as if the person who wrote that note is a friend or someone you’re coaching, someone you’re helping out. What would you tell them? If that was your child (your daughter), if that was someone that you loved that had written that, what would you say to them to help coach them through it, right?

The truth is, all of us are people who have given advice at some point in our lives. We’re all — even a small bit of us is an advice giver, and what coaching really is is coaching is really about listening to another person and pin-pointing things that they are not recognizing. That is why I still, to this day, have a coach because my coach can listen to me talk, and she can pin-point things in my language that I will never have realized that I’m thinking, and she can suggest things for my life that I will never have come up with because I’m not objective.

Now, outside of working with a coach, you’re not gonna get that objectivity. It’s impossible. We cannot be completely objective about our own lives. If coaching is inaccessible to you, self-coaching is your next best thing. It is going to allow you to have at least more objectivity by creating distance, creating separation between that problem-self and the problem-solver-self, between your “client” self and your “coach” self. That is what I’ve got for you today.

The last thing that I will say is that if you are a person who doesn’t have a problem-solving voice in your head, if you don’t find yourself throughout the day talking yourself through things, if you’re always talking yourself out of it and not talking yourself into it, that is a great sign that you could really, really, really benefit from coaching because sometimes in order to build that problem-solving voice, we need someone else to come in and model it in our lives. When you hear the responses from your coach in Alliance Coaching every single week, you’re gonna learn what that voice sounds like, and you’re gonna develop your own voice in your head that’s gonna start to do that same thing.

Our discount is ending at the end of September! After that, we believe — at least the plan right now is to go back-to-back to doing three-month packages. You’ll no longer be able to sign for six months. So, I highly, highly, highly suggest you get on that, especially because there is a potential, towards the end of the year, we tend to have a higher number of applications. So, get in now before we fill up.

That is what I have for you. I will talk to you next week! Thank you for indulging me with this series, and I will see you in the next one!