Recently, I was working with my own coach and we got stuck.  I was struggling, he was struggling, and we both admitted it.  I was in a place where I just didn’t feel ready to move from and so we got stuck in the mud.  I didn’t even try to do the homework I was given as I just didn’t connect with it.

Why’s Being “Good” So Bad?

I had been trying to be a “good” client and was saying the things I said because it sounded “good”.  I realised that I had been telling myself stories to try to make sense of my world and those stories were my best attempt at trying to talk myself into wanting to believe the things I was saying as well as trying to convince my coach.

Well, it wasn’t getting me anywhere!  I knew I wanted to keep working with my coach, but for that to happen, things would have to change.  I contacted my coach to say that I was ready to continue and we scheduled our next session.  When we finished that call, it felt like we had reached a whole new place for our coaching relationship.

How did it happen? It’s amazing how far a little bit of honesty can go!  Both of us had the courage to ask out loud why it wasn’t working and listened to what the other had to say.  My coach told me that he felt like he was being shut out.  This was coming from the same man who had said in previous sessions that I was so open with what we were talking about and that we got into more detail and workable content in just one hour than he did with many of his clients in three months of coaching them.

My coach was feeling shut out, yet relished my openness….something wasn’t right.  He had just voiced the reality of what had been going on in my life.  I wanted help, but I didn’t want to need it.  Wow!!  What a powerful statement.  What a heartbreaking truth.  As soon as he said it, I knew that it was the beginning, middle and end of the explanation for many of my struggles over the last few years.

I connected with the second part of it immediately…I consider myself a competent and intelligent woman, who has a perfectionist streak that quite often comes to the forefront.  In our coaching that followed this insight, I realized that I had taught and conditioned myself that needing help is a sign of weakness and it contradicts competence and intelligence.  We immediately realised that I had no problem needing and asking for help when it comes to brain matters, but with heart matters – it was a whole other story!

Being Honest Might Not Be So Bad After All

Realising that this truth could hold the key to why I feel unhappy in several areas of my life, including my friendships, relationship, and career – what was the truth I needed to begin to tell myself instead of the story I was trying to talk myself into believing? His intuition was telling him that I had learned to pay attention to my left brain (my thoughts and rational responses) and ignore my right brain (the sensations in my body that help the brain to determine my feelings).

And so while I will never stop trying to tell myself stories to bring rational explanations to things that go on in my life, I now make the time to sit quietly or lie in my bed at night and focus all my attention on my body and help it to communicate with me.  Unlearning and relearning is a really slow process, but I know that to fully understand myself, I have to be willing to put in the time and effort required to truly get in touch with my feelings and to stop running away from them towards my thoughts.

Feeling Safe Within Ourselves

Our thoughts are a safe place.  They are generally rational because we have talked ourselves into believing our own stories.  Feelings are a minefield for many of us.  We are not taught how to process them appropriately so they become a strength and so we learn to treat them as a weakness and overrule them with our thoughts.  I’ll probably always default to my thoughts over my feelings, but my hope is that with time, I will be more at ease with honoring both. 

Share Your Insights

Where are you conscious of shutting out your feelings – of ignoring your body’s wisdom and defaulting to your mind instead?  What life-changing realisations are you on the brink of making now that you have given yourself permission to embrace them?  Share your comments below.

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(photo credit: Joe Penniston)