JST34 – The Secrets of Coaching with Clarity: Part 3 – The solution to the only 2 challenges you’re ever up against
"They misunderestimated me.”
– George W Bush
We all have areas in our lives where things flow effortlessly, and other areas where we struggle. I sometimes joke that all my clients have the same two challenges when I first meet them. In this article, I’m going to reveal the only two challenges you’re ever really up against, and the unexpected answer to how you and your clients can resolve them more easily than you may ever have imagined.
Challenge Number 1: Preoccupation
When I first meet a coaching client, they’re typically preoccupied with something. This preoccupation can take a lot of forms, but one thing’s usually clear; they’ve been thinking about it. A lot! Brooding, ruminating, trying to figure it out. They’ve given it a lot of thought, and it’s usually made matters worse. Here are some examples of the kinds of things people have been thinking far too much about:
– I’m trying to find my purpose in life, my true calling
– I’ve been thinking about starting a coaching business
– I’m trying to find the right relationship (or fix my current one)
– I want to leave my job and do work I love, but I don’t know what it is
– I’m trying to change my limiting beliefs
– I want to play a bigger game but I don’t know what it is
– I want to get slim, fit and healthy, but I keep falling back into bad habits
– I’m desperate to improve my money situation, but nothing seems to change
– I really want to get some clients, but nothing I’ve tried seems to work
– etc
By the time they get to me, they’ve usually chewed it over, written about it and ordered books from Amazon about it. Sometimes they’ve made progress in all kinds of other areas, but there’s this one thing that they just don’t feel they’re progressing with (or at least, not in the way they want to).
Challenge Number 2: Underestimation
Similarly, when I first meet my clients, they tend to radically underestimate their talents and abilities. And do you know where they tend to overlook their talents and abilities the most? You guessed it. In the area where they’re preoccupied! Typically, they have a number of aspects of their life where they do really well. If we go through their personal histories, we find numerous examples of stellar qualities, including…
– Natural leadership (sometimes in ‘crunch’ situations where many people would crumble)
– Creativity and innovation, finding elegant solutions to problems
– Wisdom, intuition and gut-feel, bringing them clarity of direction in times of uncertainty
– Resilience and resourcefulness (often in the face of extremely challenging circumstances)
– High performance, often at tasks that would have others wobble with trepidation
– Love and connection, kindness and compassion
– etc
I’ve never met a person who didn’t have examples of these kinds of qualities. It sometimes takes a little time and curiosity to find them, but they’re always there. Yet when it comes to the area of their lives where they’ve been perceiving themselves as ‘stuck’ or struggling, people tend to overlook the fact that we all have access to these powerful resources.
The unexpected solution
When I explain this, the next question is usually, “So how can I fix that”. That’s a natural question to ask, but there’s a more useful question to ask first:
“How did you end up stuck in challenges 1 and 2 in the first place?”
The answer to this is simple: a fundamental misunderstanding about where our experience is created. Here it is in a nutshell:
“We’re always living in the experience of the principle of thought taking form. We’re always living in the feeling of our moment-to-moment ‘thinking’, but it often seems like we’re feeling something other than our moment to moment thinking. We’re feeling the principle of thought taking form in the moment , but it seems like we’re feeling our bank balance, our schedule or what the boss said to us last week. We’re living in the feeling of our thinking in the moment, but it seems like our feeling’s got something to do with what my partner did, or my belly fat, or that job interview next week.
This profoundly deceptive ‘trick of the mind’ is responsible for challenges 1 and 2, and is the cause of the majority of problems we face as individuals, organisations and as an entire species.
So what’s the solution? Get a deeper understanding of the principles behind clarity. As your embodied understanding of these principles continues to deepen, you’ll find yourself getting freed from those preoccupations, more and more quickly. In the process, you’ll find yourself falling effortlessly into your innate resources and capabilities. The result? You’ll have what you need, when you need it. And this doesn’t just go for you; it goes for your clients as well.
If you’d like to get a sense of the impact that understanding the principles behind clarity can have for you and your clients, check out the results people are getting on our Certified Clarity Practitioner Programme. I’m delivering the final module of the 2013/14 programme this weekend, and the 2014/15 programme starts in September. The first 35 people have already booked their places, so there are only 13 places left, and the price goes up on July 31st. You can have a look now to find out if it’s a good fit for you (live-streaming options also available). You can get access to the full information here: https://www.jamiesmart.com/cpp-page-1/