Recently I’ve been coaching clients through such a vast range of different challenges – separation and divorce, drug addiction, procrastination, finding their purpose, feelings of depression/anxiety/suicidal thoughts, and recovery from past trauma. While these issues may seem totally different from each other, there is a huge, overarching theme that connects them all – a lack of self love and limiting beliefs holding us back.
On the face of it, a lack of self love isn’t always obvious. You might be the most confident, outspoken person in the room, and so it’s harder to tell that you may have a low sense of self worth.
I seem to be coaching quite a few clients recently through relationship break ups.
That’s rarely the reason they hire a coach. They hire me because they’re confused, unhappy, having anxiety and panic attacks, and unsure about their direction in life.
It usually takes a few sessions (quite a few, in some cases), for a client to stop kidding themselves.
If we are feeling a sense of confusion, overwhelm, unhappiness and showing signs and symptoms of depression and/or anxiety, ask yourself what isn’t working in your life. Be honest with yourself.
If we aren’t being true to ourselves about what is causing us pain, and we hide our feelings, we are lying to ourselves as well as others. We stick our heads in the sand about what’s really going on and might distract ourselves by burying ourselves in work, or using negative coping strategies such as alcohol, drugs, over-eating, over-exercising, gaming, watching mindless TV or scrolling through the Facebook newsfeed like a zombie.
We are ignoring our gut feelings about something, something BIG.
The longer we ignore our gut feeling for, the more it nudges at us, and the more we need to do to avoid it. Over time, we get so good at lying to ourselves that it manifests as feelings of confusion, overwhelm, stress, anxiety and depression. When someone asks us what’s wrong, we respond with the answer “I don’t know.”
This is why it can take several coaching sessions to really get to the crux of the issue. It’s usually quite obvious to me as a Coach what the underlying issue really is, but I have to detach from that. Coaching is about supporting my clients to come up with their own answers, by asking a series of questions.
Eventually, the client gets to their own answers, because I have provided a safe space for that to happen. The length of time this takes is different for everyone but depends on how good the client has gotten at shutting down their true feelings, and the consequences they believe will happen if they are honest with themselves.
Your gut feeling is there for a reason. It’s there to serve you on a deeper level; it’s telling you that something is wrong and that you either need to change a situation, or how you are responding to it.
If you continue to ignore your gut feeling, it will end with it biting you in the @rse on a scale much bigger than the possible negative consequences you’d imagined.
If you’re currently struggling with feeling confused, depressed, overwhelmed, anxiety or any other negative feelings, ask yourself this question:
If I 100% loved, honoured, respected, accepted and valued myself, what would I be doing right now?
Would you be in the relationship you’re in? Would you stay in the job that you hate? Would you be stuffing down your feelings with booze/food/drugs? Would you be living in the same house/country?
How would your life look and feel, if you were being 100% true to yourself?
Pretty much 100% of the time, once my clients get to a place of acceptance and understanding for the decision they know they need to make, and they take the action their gut feeling has been wanting them to take for some time, the consequences are never as bad as they imagined.
If they worried that others would judge them, they’re usually surprised at the amount of love and compassion they receive from friends and family. If they worried about how their partner would feel, they usually can see that it was the right decision for them too in the end. All the practical elements of the decision are usually never as bad as they thought they would be.
This is because when we take action based on being true to ourselves, we are showing ourselves self love. When we take action based on what we know is the right thing to do, it frees up SO much energy.
Imagine how much energy you need to use each and every day to resist what you know is right? It’s exhausting. No wonder you’re confused, overwhelmed, depressed and anxious, with the amount of effort it takes to go against how you really feel every day.
When you finally accept what you need to do, it’s like taking the lid off the pressure cooker. Yes, it may be messy initially, but it’s usually a huge relief to finally release the resistance and do what’s right.
With all this extra energy comes freedom, happiness and contentment. All the things that you thought would be hard actually aren’t. And when you follow the right path, the universe supports you in that, lining things up for you so that things flow in a way that has more ease and less effort.
Where are you not being true to yourself, and what do you need to do about it?
