Today you will be reading the experience of one of my life coaching clients. She recently read my complimentary eBook “10 Steps to Creating the Life You Want” and shared with me how completing a very basic exercise in this book already facilitated a mental shift and reset her “internal compass”.
The exercise in question is as follows:
List five key positive and five key negative events in your life. Write down next to them how you may have created them, contributed to them, or just paved the way for them. Looking at your list, what would you like to change to consciously create more of what you really want in your life? How can you do this?
My client wrote the following about her experiences completing this exercise:
“I began this exercise mildly interested in the process and the results, but not expecting to learn very much that I didn’t already know. After years of meditation practice and various other forms of personal and spiritual development, including psychotherapy, I thought I knew my own strengths and weaknesses pretty well. I was in for a big surprise!”
One of her key learnings was:
[…] the message was clear. For each ‘bad decision’, I had opted for what I had perceived as safety – the safety of an academic comfort zone; the safety of a paying job; the safety of denying opportunities that would stretch me; the safety of nostalgia for the past over the excitement of discovering a new unknown city; and the safety of being too ‘nice and polite’ to negotiate more favourable terms at work.
[…]
It’s not as if I had never come across this advice before and I do realise it is neither original nor profound. These very messages abound in self-help literature, in the memes that surround us on social media, and in the advice of well-meaning friends and advisors. Believe me I had heard it all before.
But to work something out for yourself, based on the very evidence of your own life, is fundamentally different. With concrete examples and incontrovertible proof, the message finally sinks in and is understood at a deep, visceral level: this particular piece of advice – over and above all the other advice out there that’s jostling for my attention – this particular piece of advice applies to me. I have proved it.
And now for the last part of the question [in the First Step to Mastery]: What would you like to change to consciously create more of what you really want in your life? How can you do this?
This is no longer an abstract question for me. Nor is it a vague resolution made today and forgotten tomorrow. In each new situation, each small or large day-to-day dilemma, my internal compass has been re-set and the kinds of decisions I am making these days are very different.
I’m amazed that an exercise that took about 30 minutes has yielded such rich results. And I know that I can use it again. Faced with difficult decisions in any particular area of my life – health, parenting, career, etc. – I can simply repeat the exercise with a focus on that area.
It’s such a simple formula: What has worked? What hasn’t worked? Why? What does that tell you?
Whatever you do, don’t under-estimate what it can tell you.”
Interested in experiencing the power of coaching?
Interested in completing the exercises in my ebook yourself? You can download your copy here.
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