Your Self Improvement Blog

A client recently told me that, to further his own Self Improvement, he had done a weekend life-coaching workshop. A fellow participant called him later, trying to sell her life coaching services to him, proudly boasting that she had recently qualifed – the same two-day course that he’d attended himself! Twenty five years old, she’d inherited money from an aunt and was about to spend $25,000 on a franchise for a Life Coaching Program. She’d like him to be her first client! He asked me:

“How can you advise anyone on what you’ve never experienced? How could a 25 year old contribute to the understanding of a 50 old who is on his third marriage, has seen one business fail, been at the top in five high-powered jobs and is at a major turning point in his business and personal life? How can you be a life coach at twenty five?”

You can’t! I’ve been working with clients since 1996, before that I led a bank, before that I was in senior management with a number of life assurers and I’ve been studying psychology (still studying and, I know that I will always be studying!) since 1992. I’ve often been ahead of the posse in my career but I’ve also made some dreadful mistakes. I’ve live and I learn!

However, I’m no “Life Coach”, whatever that actually is exactly – I just facilitate people’s understanding of how we all possess our own inner wisdom and an inner compass that will, if properly developed, lead us towards happiness, success and peace of mind – all we have to do is free ourselves from the leash to which so-called normal people are unwittingly tethered. Sadly though, it’s rarely explained to normal people that they live unwitting lives – automatic reactive lives, according to years of research. How many of your everyday repetitive tasks are done mindlessly – from brushing your teeth to grunting Hello to your loved one(s) each evening? Our actions are reactions. Psychology proves that this unwittingness stops us paying attention to what we’re doing – to the extent that we do everything mindlessly. Normal life is an unwitting treadmill created by a state of mind that we’re completely unaware of. Break that mindset and you’ll arrive in a foreign land! – a place where you’re single-minded and focused – the hallmarks of success.

However, many life coaches’ clients develop a dependence on the coach, without realizing that they have their own answers within – if only they’d pay attention to what really successful people call “gut instinct”. You’ll get in touch with your very own gut instinct if you break your everyday cycle of repetitive mindless behaviour. Why else would Harvard insist that their executive summer school attendees write with the “other” hand? Break a few little habits and you’ll end up breaking the biggest bad habit of your adult lifetime – reacting mindlessly. You’ll begin to pay attention to what you’re actually doing, regardless of how repetitive that task might be. You will actually experience that you do indeed possess your own internal wisdom and compass – discover this and you’re on the highway to a place where a life coach will be as superfluous as a typewriter ribbon on a PC!

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