Life Coaching

There's a device used in fiction to create tension and conflict between characters (which keeps readers turning pages). You give each of your characters a different script, and then make them think they're reading from the same one.

You might have a school principal calling a parent to tell them about their child's imminent expulsion.

The principal's script says: this child is a menace.

The parent's script says: this child is the highly gifted apple of my eye.

Imagine how the conversation might go?

When you're feeling out of sorts, anxious or irritated by everything, up to and including someone standing on your shadow - it's easy to get stuck in a loop of 'why?' trying to figure out the underlying cause.

"Why?" can feel like a good question. You're being self reflective. You're taking responsibility for how you're feeling, trying to figure it out, understand it. And sometimes this is useful… until it isn't, when you keep spinning in the feeling.

When that happens, "what" can be a better question.

A complaint is a fight against something. Fighting against things can get really tiring. Endlessly pushing away the things we don’t want, the things that aren’t right, the things that don’t feel good.

So what to do? One thing we can do is look inside the complaint for the desire it holds. If we don’t want strawberry ice cream, what DO we want? If this feels wrong, what feels right?

Sometimes, the answer is obvious (chocolate ice cream, of course).

But sometimes it’s harder to figure out…

It’s an easy trap to fall into, given the culture we live in, to believe that parts of ourselves aren’t right. To find ourselves thinking that it’s not okay to be needy, to think that we need to kill off our people pleasers, exorcise our anxiety, stop being a victim and claim our empowerment. To beat ourselves up for finding it hard to take off the suit of armour and be more open, more soft, more vulnerable.

It’s like we’re trying to chop ourselves into pieces and only keep the good bits.

But that’s not how healing works. That’s not how growth works. That’s not how we get what we want.

How much mental real estate is taken up by things you feel you should do, but haven’t? The endless to do list that gets bumped from day to day and week to week (and in some cases, month to month or year to year…).

What if that weight wasn’t there any more?

There’s a saying that drifts around the place about humans and time that says something like: we overestimate how much we can get done in a day, and we underestimate how much we get done in a year.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it was built.

To make this quirk of human minds work for you, read on for a suggestion..

This is a slightly different take on the ‘what do you want to do with your life?’ question.

What do you want to have done?

And then, what could you do today, in order to make that your reality later in life?

There’s something delightful about stepping outside of routine and doing things differently. Interrupting our regular patterns with something interesting or beautiful or curious or nurturing.

It’s also sometimes quite hard to do, given that it’s easy to get into ruts and routines, and the point of a rut or a routine is that you don’t have to think about it. And if you’re not thinking about what you’re doing, it’s hard to make a choice to do things a different way.

Which is why it can be nice to enlist support to interrupt our patterns.