Today was my intro call with a coach I hired for myself. When you are a professionally trained coach, you've seen the changes a series of well formed questions can make in a person's life. Their mindset shifts. They see things differently. Can'ts become coulds and dids. They glow because they are no longer under the weight of their oppressive thoughts and beliefs - thoughts and beliefs you helped them see and discard - and now they instead see opportunity everywhere and feel confident in their abilities. You showed them how to take away the clouds of their thoughts to reveal the stars and the sunshine that was always there. It's amazing.
Coaches need coaches too. Sometimes we can coach ourselves around situations - we know the tools after all. And sometimes we need someone who has an outside perspective to call us out on our specific flavor of mental cloud creation. The mind does a great job hiding the fact that you are the one creating the cloudy weather. It would rather complain about the lack of sunshine... because - look - it's so obvious there is no sunshine, right? We call that "true" vs "Truth" in coaching. Something that is true might seem true - until you see the Truth (capital T). Yes it is true that it is cloudy, but the Truth is you created the clouds and there would be sunshine if you stopped. I had a true vs. Truth moment today.
Our intro call went something like this... Building a business is hard. It takes commitment, dedication, effort, focus, and there are risks. You get up early. You protect the time and the process because it's important. And if you are having a hard time getting up early, you should fix that. Make it happen. That's the only way success will come. Right? A focused effort. I want someone to help hold me accountable to what I need to do to grow my business.
My coach's first reaction was, "Wow, you're really should-ing all over yourself. That's a lot of heavy energy around having to get up early and building a business." I agreed. It felt heavy. I really enjoy sleeping in and getting a full 8 hours of sleep - not 6 or 7 like most people. But if you don't carve out the time, nothing will happen. That was my "true." It felt blindingly obvious.
She contrasted my energy regarding the business with that of coaching itself. I shared my successes with clients. How much I enjoyed coaching itself. How well it suited me and my skills. My energy was light, glowing, enthusiastic, happy.
Then she said, "You know it makes sense why you don't want to get out of bed early, right? Why would you? It doesn't sound like fun."
Indeed! Why would I want to get out of bed when I felt so much heaviness around the duties and obligations of business. The business part of coaching isn't fun for me. There was the Truth with a capital T.
On first pass, you might think she is saying to only do what is fun. To forget responsibilities and be self-indulgent - but she isn't. What she is saying is, how could you change your perception of business so that it IS FUN and you WANT to do it. How can you find another perspective where there are no "shoulds". Or another way of looking at it is - "Imagine creating a business where every part of it is fun for you - what would that look like?"
In both cases you have a mindset where you stop creating clouds to block the sunshine. You can change your perspective of the thing, or change the thing itself, but the "true" of "Business is not fun" is not Truth. And with this awareness, the mind positively tries to solve the problem. What's the new perspective? How can I make this fun for me? And that's the start.
There is more to it. These thoughts come from somewhere. We will have to dig in and discover their root, then create a new story, a new mythology, a new belief. But in the meantime just looking to find the lens of "fun" in business and anything where there once was obligation is a small awareness shift that will create a big mindset change. That's the beauty of coaching.