My Approach
My Approach to Coaching
My approach draws on a wide variety of disciplines and is custom tailored to each unique client. Some of these areas include Acceptance and Commitment Coaching, evolutionary psychology, mindfulness, and stoicism.
I use the terms “Tension” and “Vision” to describe two basic realms of coaching. Tension encompasses the negative things in your life that we want to change; the places where we work to reduce stress, anxiety, worry, and tension. Vision, on the other hand, refers to the positive changes we want to make; things like planning, goal setting, dreaming, etc. Let’s take a look at these two sides of the coin.
Tension
Most often, people seek coaching because they are struggling with some problem in their life. There is some kind of tension that they are having trouble resolving. Often, our first step is to normalize your struggles. Chances are that many people are going through the same thing right now. Chances are, I’ve helped numerous people navigate similar waters.
It’s usually not difficult to normalize a person’s struggle because life is hard and many issues are more common than most people realize. Problems are our birthright. We solve one and another pops up. Stress, worry, and tension are woven into our DNA.
We are, by design, unsatisfied. And this makes sense, by evolution’s logic anyway. If you accomplished something once and felt lasting satisfaction from it, you wouldn’t be motivated to get up the next day and keep working towards your survival. Positive feelings, satisfaction included, are inherently fleeting. It’s as if your brain is telling you that you need to get up each day and re-earn your place on the planet. This of course causes us lots of tension and the general feeling that so many of us struggle with, that of being “not enough.”
Likewise, happiness is fleeting and eludes many of us. Our mind, instincts, and emotions evolved to help us survive, not necessarily to be happy. Our primitive ancestors had various needs, but the most fundamental of them all was to avoid danger. All of our other cares and concerns are moot if we got ourselves killed. In this way, avoiding danger trumps everything else in our psychology. This leads to what psychologists call the “negativity bias.” This bias explains our tendency to focus more on the negative parts of our life than the positive. This might be a good recipe for survival in a harsh landscape, but it is often unpleasant for you.
Furthermore, these negative dynamics are intensified by the modern environment. This is because our brains were designed for a time long past. Evolution takes place very slowly and our hardwiring has changed very little over the past 10,000 years. Our instinctual systems are stuck in time, intended to help us thrive in the close-knit, hunter-gatherer societies of our ancestors. Modern living is vastly different and presents many problems for our “caveman” brains.
This ancient programming often leaves us navigating the complexities of the modern world in a state of near-constant tension. We engage in self-sabotaging behavior, overthink things, and become overwhelmed emotionally. For example, think of how often your fight-or-flight stress response gets triggered. This reaction is rarely helpful in dealing with most modern problems, yet it remains our default.
In many ways, we are all fish out of water in this modern world. But we don’t have to be. There’s a scientific understanding of why we often feel stuck, and equally, there’s a science-backed approach to what we can do about it. My approach presents a unique way of seeing your hangups and setbacks. This perspective will help you make better sense of life and will provide you with tools to reduce tension and overcome that which is tripping you up and holding you back.
Life is hard and full of tension, but you don’t have to face it alone. By partnering with a coach, you are bringing a trusted companion and ally along with you on your journey.
Vision
In my coaching, the flip side of tension is vision. We don’t just want to reduce the negative, we also want to build the positive. Just as we work to reduce tension, we also work to create a vision of the life you want.
Coaching can help you create this vision for your future, come up with a plan to get there, and help you stay organized and motivated to see it through. Goal setting, action plans, and accountability are a big part of this process, but that’s just the start. For those who are interested, coaching can take a deep dive into your life. We can help you clarify priorities and talk about life direction. We can work on identifying your values and come up with a mission statement. We can develop your sense of meaning and purpose. This foundational work helps you to have a “north star” by which you can orient yourself and make decisions. We then use all this to flesh out your vision for the future. From here we strategize, break things down, and create actionable goals.
Easy right? Well, coming up with a plan is only part of the process. So often we know what we need to do, but we have a hard time getting ourselves to do it. Here we turn towards strategies to help us get things done. We can focus on things like cultivating motivation, self-discipline, habits, productivity, time management, resilience, and grit to help you follow through with your plans.
Further, we can address various life areas that are needed in order to come into alignment with your vision. We can build your confidence, enhance your relationships and relationship skills, and explore areas such as mindset design, comfort zone expansion, career direction, study skills, self-esteem, mindfulness practices, work-life balance, and navigating indecision.
Want to know more? Schedule a consultation and we can talk about the details of your life and how we might tailor an approach that is right for you.
