Cure for coaching perfectionism

As I wrote in the last post, if you look at your behavior and the underlying beliefs and fears about those beliefs, you can find out what's really motivating that behavior. For instance, if you're avoiding marketing your business, and you secretly fear you're not a good enough coach, then avoiding marketing really helps you, because you don't ever have to experience that judgment from others about whether they think you're good enough or not. You've carefully constructed a protective behavior to keep you safe from experiencing the full consequence of what you fear. No wonder you do it! It's really the only thing that would keep you safe from finding out you're not good enough.

Now that you know why you're doing what you're doing, what do you do about this?

You can keep doing what you're doing- in some ways, it's been working for you. No harm in that, unless you want to have a different experience.

Or,

You change what you believe about not being good enough.

You either change your belief that you are good enough, or you change your belief that not being perfect is actually perfect. Either one works. You may also want change what other people's opinions means to  you.

"But" you say, "That's insane! It's just not possible to change outlook so easily! No one changes beliefs that quickly! If so, we'd all be happy, content and fully realized!"But what if it really was that easy, and the only reason you haven't changed your outlook is because everyone always told you it's long and difficult?

As human beings, we're socialized from birth to accept what others tell us- about how things work, what's acceptable, what's possible, etc. Depending on who was in your life while growing up,  you probably absorbed a lot of their beliefs, without ever questioning them. in fact, a lot of their beliefs are probably so ingrained that they may seem like truths to you, rather than the opinions of the adults in your life. Some things may seem unchangeable, or only changeable with lots of effort and time, like what a given situation means to you.

Yet everyone has a story that goes something like this- " I was miserable until one day, I realized that I could look at that situation differently, and it never affected me the same way again, because it didn't mean the same thing to me anymore." Have you ever had an experience like that in your life? Of course you have. You've probably had more than one.

In the minutes before you changed your belief about what that situation meant to you, you were faced with a decision of sorts- whether or not you would look at things differently. And then in the next moment,  you took the decision to change your belief and outlook.  And regardless of all the agony beforehand, get this- it only took you a moment to change your belief.

And you never looked at it the same way again.

I will propose this thought: Perhaps you can do this more frequently than the occasional epiphanal moment, but no one ever told you so. Perhaps you can give youself an epiphany as frequently as you like. Maybe there are lots of things in your life and business that you can look at differently- change what you believe about that situation and what it means to you, without having to agonize and fret endlessly.

After all, you already did it, probably more than once. It was quick and it was easy. You can do it again, as much as you like. Replace an old disempowering idea with one that's more useful to you. It's something that you can do right now.

Sandra Sinclair

www.coachmarketingsuccess.com