Lesson 14: The Choice
and the Coach
The next two locations on the map will move you much further from the familiar territory of the Pit and into new ways of thinking and a new future.
At this point, I’m only going to cover the Choice position quite briefly; it will have a larger role later in the book, when we look at how to get around blocks. However, just because we are only attending to it briefly here, that doesn’t undermine its immense importance in the process. In fact change is all about recognizing that you have a Choice in all situations, and especially at those times when it seems as if there isn’t any. You could consider that all the positions on the map are about choice – choosing to get a life you love by taking real action. For the moment, however, we’ll focus on the Choice position as a transition point between using the Stop to avoid moving into the Pit and choosing to move towards being your own Coach.
Stand in the Choice position on the map, and again notice the footprints showing the direction you need to face. Now you are between the route into the Pit and the route to the Coach, which leads you to a life you love. Your job is to weigh up the direction in which you’d like to go.
Similarly to using physical action to make your Stop powerful, there’s a particular set of actions that can help you get in touch with the feeling of Choice. In this case, you make the gesture of Choice by placing your upturned palms in front of you, one to the right and one to the left and, while looking at your right hand (on the same side as the Pit) saying out loud:
Then immediately look at your left hand (which is on the side of a life you love) saying:
The best choice should be abundantly clear, so this step might seem slightly irrelevant, as of course most people would choose A Life You Love over the Pit. However, it’s here for two reasons:
Now you’ve reaffirmed what you want from life, it’s time to move into the Coach position.
One of the main purposes of this process is to move your internal conversation from one where you drift in and out of the Pit to a much more life-enhancing conversation, which has a very clear structure and leads you towards a life you love. This is the conversation that you’ll develop between you and an inner Coach.
And because many people don’t have a brilliant inner Coach, the first step is to develop one. In fact, the closest most people get to being coached is telling themselves they are no good and should do better. This, however, is not Coaching.
Instead pause for a moment and consider what would it be like if you had the most amazing Coach in your life – available 24/7, ready at a moment’s notice, providing brilliant insights based on a deep and experienced knowledge of you, your past, your brilliance, and the ways you trip yourself up.
If they were on your team, it would be easy to achieve happiness, success or fulfilment… and this is exactly what you’ll be learning to do.
I can’t overemphasize how significant and important this role is going to be in getting a life you love, so let’s spend a bit of time discovering what makes for a great inner Coach.
One of the ways to learn about becoming a Coach would be for me to give you a long list of coaching qualities to memorize, but this would be the least useful way of doing it. I have actually included such a list in the book, but I don’t want you to go searching for it yet. This is because one of the best coaching qualities is to ask effective questions rather than simply provide answers. In fact, it’s so vital that I’ve written a whole book just about the most important questions in the world – The 10 Questions To Ask For Success.
Why might questions be better than answers? In my experience, there are many benefits to having a Coach ask you life-changing questions. These include:
For example, if you ask the question, ‘Can you tell me what I should take on my trip?’ The answer might be ‘swimwear, T-shirts, shorts and suntan lotion’ – all useful items for a trip to the beach, but not the Arctic Circle.
But if, instead of supplying advice, your Coach asks you the question, ‘How will you find out what you need?’ you’ll be able to work out what’s needed for this and all your future trips, without having to check in with the Coach for advice every time.
So questions make you more independent, self-empowered and in charge of your choices. This not only naturally makes you feel better about yourself, but also means you don’t need to rely on someone else for support, which is important as they may not always be available when you need them. But your inner Coach and the great questions you’re about to learn will always be on hand to help.
Write down your answers to these important questions.
I would say it is definitely you!
It’s true that you may not have all the answers or even make the right choices all the time. However, I would strongly argue that is a much better situation to be in than to have someone else guessing or thinking they know what’s best for you. No one else should be making decisions and designing your life for you. You above all others are best placed to make those kinds of decisions about your future. Giving someone else that important, influential role in your life is a fast route to the Pit, as it then becomes easy to blame everyone else for your problems and for not having a life you love.
So, in line with good coaching practice, write down your answers to find out what makes a great Coach.
Look back through your answers to these five questions, and you’ll have uncovered part of the blueprint essential for a great Coach.
Now turn to the glossary and look through the list of ‘great Coaching qualities’. As you read through, you may find that it reminds you that the Coaches in questions one and three had some of these qualities, which you may have missed out initially; and you’ll probably notice the Coach from question two had very few of these vitally important qualities.
We can see from this that Coaching is not an inbuilt talent, it’s a set of behaviours – something we dû. So the question is:
For many people the answer will be ‘not great’, so let’s explore how that happened and what you need to do to get back to being a great inspirational Coach.
It’s worth considering, just for a moment, your parents as Coaches. This book doesn’t focus very much on the past, instead choosing the uncreated future to be our playground; however, it is true that our past is one of the factors that can tend to predict our future if we’re not mindful of it.
Your parents or main caregivers, having such a significant role in your childhood, naturally play an important role in how you feel about yourself and the world. As a result, we very often end up adopting elements of their thoughts and behaviours into our own current inner self-talk – sometimes that’s great, and sometimes it’s not so useful. The question then becomes, if you have adopted them as your inner Coach, were they actually any good at Coaching?
If not, it’s questionable whether they are suitable as a role model for such an important job.
If you go to college, to study medicine for example, then you’ll need to have passed appropriate pre-college exams, in the correct subjects and with adequate grades. If you apply for a place at medical school with two fairly irrelevant qualifications, such as knitting and pottery, then they are likely to suggest you’re not an ideal candidate for their course. This seems a relatively reasonable selection procedure. Turning your attention back to parenthood, a very obvious truth becomes clear – there is often a mismatch of the ‘entry requirements’ and ‘skills required’ for parenting
First, note down what you think are the entry requirements to parenthood. What one single thing do you need to have done to be a parent?
Well, to become a parent (if we just restrict ourselves to standard biological parents) all you need to do is to have sex.
Getting to have sex can depend on many factors, including being lucky, attractive or drunk enough to make it happen! It can, of course, be for much more wholesome reasons, but generally we can see that the singular entry requirement for parenthood – having sex – is far removed from the skill set actually required to raise children effectively and brilliantly.
Next, note down what you consider to be the core skills require for raising children. This is my list:
Interestingly, they are fairly similar to the core skills of Coaching.
This mismatch of the ‘entry requirements of’ and ‘skills required for’ parenting is a huge problem. A result of this biological quirk is that people who aren’t very good at parenting are left to raise young, impressionable souls. And if their own parents were poor role models, the problem becomes amplified.
Although as children we think of our parents as ‘PARENTS’ they are very often just young ‘kids’ themselves who’ve been thrown into the role, with no previous experience, or a complete lack of the vital skills for the job. And these inexperienced people are doing their best, but with little guidance or insight they are often quite unaware of the long-term effects their parenting may have on their offspring.
Looking at this we can see that if our parents weren’t always the perfect role models they should have been, we shouldn’t think too ill of them or blame them or their parents in turn, for our current problems (although it may explain the origin of some of the poor quality self-talk that many of us have).
It highlights that we shouldn’t give that self-talk we’ve imported from them too much attention, as it’s simply the echoes of an out-dated experience running in our heads years after the events are long past, often long after we have forgiven them for it.
If you’ve been letting these out-dated sound tracks have any airtime or influence in your life, since it’s clear that you are in charge of running them, then you can also change them. And with that important background information in mind about your current inner Coaching, we can move onto the core steps of creating a great inner Coach.
I designed this process so that even with just a small amount of instruction you can start to be an incredible Coach to yourself, but as with the earlier steps, you’ll need to follow the instructions fairly precisely while you are in this initial training period. Just to recap the process so far:
Notice again the direction of the footprints on the map in this position, which look towards the square of the Present. Now, imagine you are a Coach and you’re looking at yourself, standing over there in that square of the Present ready for your Coaching input. As with all these positions being congruent is vital.
When teaching this process, this is one of the areas that often need lots of extra coaching and feedback, so it’s essential that you provide this for yourself. And you do this by checking in with yourself and making sure you are being congruent.
So, in this case, a congruent Coach is one who is saying the right words (and there will be a very short script for you to follow to start with) and ‘walking the talk’. Everything they say is backed up by those qualities of coaching. There’s absolutely no room for:
None of these appear in the list of Coaching qualities, and if you employed a Coach like that in real life you would be right to fire them immediately!
When you watch a great Coach at work you might see them take on a number of guises. They could be calming someone down who is stressed, inspiring someone who is doubting themselves, being kind and compassionate to someone who needs nurturing or giving important feedback that needs to be heard. However, in each role that they take they will be completely congruent.
Think about when you have seen a Coach at work – and remember coaching is everywhere – you might envisage a mother settling a frightened child, a football Coach inspiring his squad or a driving instructor stopping their pupil from crashing the car. When you think about it, you’ll already know that:
In the role of Coach you will need to do this, too – it may seem like a lot of work but it’s actually quite easy, because we already operate in this way in many different areas of our lives and are also aware when people do this well or when they do it badly. You may not have been doing a great job of Coaching yourself recently, so just make sure you recognize when you’re not using the Coaching qualities listed (see Exercise: What makes a good Coach?) and follow through with your commitment to yourself and a great future by becoming an awesome Coach to yourself.
