How to Be Yourself

To be ourselves means acknowledging how we hold ourselves back; how we may protect our hearts from others and armor against the world. How we may have learnt to deny and shut down parts of ourselves: of needing to be a certain way, in order to keep ourselves safe.

When our energy is not focused in self-protection, we become available for connection.

To be free to be ourselves we need to notice our self judgment, the shame and shrinking. The fears of not being (good) enough or being too much or of being rejected. We can let go of ideas of needing to be a better person in order to experience self acceptance. We need to give ourselves permission to accept ourselves before we can expect others to meet us in the way we want to be met. When we are open-hearted towards ourselves we can meet the world with an open heart.

We need to find a way to meet our own vulnerability, not be scared of what we feel. We need to be able to find our voice, use our anger, establish boundaries, and be assertive in order to feel comfortable with expressing our needs.

On Changing Your Story

Project Self

Stories are the way in which we make sense of the world, create meaning and understand our experience in relation to our surroundings and relationships. They are a combination of social-cultural and inner psychological workings. Stories can be a narrative to hold a series of events together in time, to create an account, create continuity and order complexity. They can also be a work of fiction and imaginings designed by the narrator to purvey a message to their audience. Their re-telling alters or refines their meaning, as does the context in which they are told. They may have some basis in reality,…

On Doing Nothing

Project Self

Mind the gap is a familiar warning. Mine to you would be make the gap. Find the gap. The interval; the interlude; the break; the empty space. Create space; find time; in between… Ensure that there is a space between arrival and departure, between one thing and the next, between one zone and another. Be aware of those moments, those transitions and transactions. Find those un-named, ill-defined places without purpose. Relish their vacuum and step into them. They are opportunities for respite, reflection and rest. For being without mission or requirement or determination. Don’t avoid them or rush to…

On Finding Balance

Project Self

There’s a beautiful concept held in the mathematically designed Gomboc. It’s an object that self-rights itself whichever way it is pushed over. It has one point of stability and one of instability and will always return to the stable point. The shape was modelled on a tortoise which uses it’s shell to rock itself back onto its feet once it’s been turned over, and is dependent on doing so for survival. If the Gomboc was a conscious being, rather than an object, imagine what it would feel knowing that whatever forces conspired against it, it had the capacity to withstand…

On Changing Your Perception

Project Self

The World as you see it is not The World. We are meaning making creatures. We have to be in order to make sense of the world we are in. To locate ourselves within a framework which provides us with security and safety and enables us to negotiate complexity. We shrink the world into our own world through a scale of recognition and familiarity. We internalise the world. We will skew, adapt, interpret, deny and project so that what we see and experience is an internal representation or perception of external reality, framed by our previous experiences and understanding. We both replay and look for…

On Finding Your Voice

Project Self

I have two clients for whom the voice is a central theme of the coaching exploration, for very different reasons. One wants to find their voice in the world, the other has a very strong voice to the extent that it is an important part of their identity. As a coach I have had to find my voice through being in the world in a different, more visible way. The voice is a fascinating meeting of expression, communication and emotion in sound. It is physically heard through the ears and felt through vibration in the body. It is how we…

On Self Responsibility, Truth & Freedom

Project Self

I had two thought provoking conversations recently; one with a therapist and one with a friend. The therapist was asking me what coaching is to me. The friend was talking about therapy. The first conversation raised the search for truth as a central issue. The second; freedom. Which made me reflect on the relationship between truth and freedom. Ultimately in coaching we know the client has the answer. The coach’s role is to help clients verbalise it and acknowledge it. The answer is the truth. We know our own truth but we do much to avoid it. We may not…

On Questioning

Project Self

Coaching is fundamentally based on the skill of asking questions. The power of coaching lies in being able to ask the right kind of question at the right time. This can clarify, trigger, challenge or reveal; but results in a fundamental shift in mindset or position for the client. Curiosity, exploration, reflection and enquiry creates insight and discovery. The question itself can be quite simple, but its power lies in pertinence. Someone asking us a question prompts us to question our self and to hear our answer out loud, which we may already know at a deeper level, but may…

On Knowing What to Do

Project Self

We can become divorced from our own physical feelings, from the relationship between mind and body. We get stuck in trying to find the right answer in our rational mind. We think the better answer is to figure something out by solving it as a problem with the ‘correct’ solution, coming from a place of considered analysis. What does it feel like when the answer is ‘Yes’. And when the answer is ‘No’. We need to enable ourselves to understand and read our ‘emotional barometer’, to help us trust ourselves, to give us a measure. Our instinctive response to a situation…

On Being Ok Where You Are

Project Self

“We are at where we are at”. This was often said by one of my life coaching course trainers and has stayed with me. The starting point of coaching is to accept where we are. And if we don’t really want to be there, to accept that too. Too often we create stress wishing things were not the way they were or wishing things were different, often berating ourselves and our capacity to do something about it in the process. This is a positive place to start; where we are. Before acceptance comes awareness. Coaching is often at its most…

How to Be Yourself

On Changing Your Story

On Doing Nothing

On Finding Balance

On Changing Your Perception

On Finding Your Voice

On Self Responsibility, Truth & Freedom

On Questioning

On Knowing What to Do

On Being Ok Where You Are

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