Why You Can't Coach Yourself

No matter how smart you are and how much coach training and practice you have completed, your brain will not allow you to coach yourself if there are any emotions attached to the issue.

Your brain is a meaning-making machine. It likes to make sense of everything you encounter. Most people do not care for “not knowing,” the feelings of uncertainty, unpredictability, and ambiguity. When you can’t define situations you encounter, and worse, if you don’t know how to ?fit yourself comfortably into the picture, you feel unstable, even helpless. Stress increases when you feel out of control. ?

Even though you can never be sure about what will happen next, your brain uses your past experiences to make sense of each moment. You walk through your days without thinking because you depend on your brain to make the right decisions about your actions and engaging in typical interactions. You often don’t realize you have options to choose from; you live by these constructs and rules, doing what feels comfortable or something similar.

So you live your life by your past experiences and learning. Every moment you behave based on the stories and “facts” you hold in your head. The stories provide the meaning you attach to each moment (reality) and how you define yourself (identity). This is your operating system, running continuously in the background throughout the day.

Although you might still fear what will happen in the future, your brain tries to protect you by limiting your risks or formulating rationalizations for taking risks where there is adequate evidence you will get something you like or desire.

In order to expand your mind and grow, you have to clearly see the stories you are living by. Only then might you discover the thinking patterns that direct your decisions.

However, you can rarely examine your stories objectively on your own if you are emotionally-attached to the story. The emotions could be positive – you feel good living with this story – or limiting – you fear what you might see, discover, or experience when you pull the story apart. You aren’t sure what you are afraid of; your brain stops you from facing what you fear.

Your brain doesn’t want you to feel uncomfortable. Living by the script your stories compose keeps you safe, and stuck. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga says we get stuck in our automatic thought-processing and fool ourselves into thinking we are acting consciously and willfully.

How Coaching Bypasses the Protective Brain

You don’t have to be a trained coach to use a coaching approach in your conversations. If you feel compassionately curious with a sincere desire to understand how a person thinks about a situation, your presence can ensure the person feels safe enough to respond to the reflective statements you share and the questions you ask. The safety fosters the trust as they sense you are there for their higher good, not to change their mind because someone said they had to.

The coach embodies compassionate curiosity. Coachees are then willing to explore their thoughts with the coach they trust.

Then, coaches use their skills to reveal stories and thinking patterns. They disrupt autonomic ?thinking by reflecting the spoken thoughts back to the coachee and then asking questions that prompt the person to wonder why he or she thinks the way they do. These statements and questions enable coachees to see their stories as if they were laid out in front of them to be observed and analyzed.

By bringing inherited beliefs, unsupported assumptions, limiting fears, social needs, and conflicts of values to the surface, a person can better evaluate the source of their decisions and actions. Educational reformer John Dewey said, “Provoking people to think about their thinking is the single most powerful antidote to erroneous beliefs and autopilot.”

This practice of reflective inquiry opens people’s minds to become objective observers of their stories in a way that their brain will not allow them to do in self-reflection.

Using reflective inquiry initiates a shift in how people see themselves and the world, or at least how they are framing a dilemma. Coachees often say, “Wow, look at what I’m doing to myself.” Then they perceive new ways forward with a stronger commitment to taking action than if they were told what to do by an expert.

Dewey also said the most intelligent people need the most help thinking about their thinking. Smart people are the best rationalizers. They believe their reasoning wholeheartedly and will protect their opinions as solid facts. Telling them to change is a waste of time. Using strong reflections and questions is the only way to get smart people to question their thoughts.

Coaching the person instead of the problem can be called awareness- or insight-based coaching. The shifts are made in both identity and reality. This insures long-term change both in perception and action. Once the views of a situation and the personal connection to the dilemma change, so does behavior. With active support over time, the new ways of thinking and behaving become the typical way of doing things – the new stories.

When people stay stuck in their old stories, they live more in fear than fulfillment. This creates more conflicts and separation. If we are to create a more connected world, we must constantly be upgrading our personal operating systems by coaching each other. Widespread use of a coaching approach in our conversations can uplift consciousness in the world.

A Passion for Coaching

My mission is for people to know and feel their highest and most powerful self in a way that inspires them to help others to feel the same. Here, power is not the power over others, but the power to create a world that is empowering for all. Will you join me in this movement?