I have a feeling this post will get some responses, so by all means, if you have something to say, post a comment below.
As a life coach, my role is to empower people. From my point of view, every person has all the power in the world to achieve great and wonderful things, but that’s not the way most people are brought up, so I help my clients find the power inside them and become independent in their thinking, feelings and actions.
Now, if you’re living in suburbia like me, and especially if you’re working from home like me, you have heard the knock on the door, gone to see who it was and found someone collecting donations for charity. They range from extremely nice to disabled (and sometimes both), and use their charm and rehearsed pitch to get you to part with some money. Sometimes it’s a raffle ticket, sometimes it’s a poor child in some third world country and sometimes it’s a local community organization. All good and noble causes.
Call me cruel, but I always feel that charity money ends up prolonging the problems it is collected for. For instance, children in third world countries are poor because their parents feel helpless and cannot see a way out of their situation. Another example is a person with some disability, who comes up to my door and asks for my donation, because they cannot go to work, which makes me thing they could actually work as a door-to-door salesperson just as well.
When a person is given handouts, they build an identity of need. When the handouts stop, the person cannot survive without them. The alternative is to support organizations that develop infrastructure and teach people how to take care of themselves. There are such organizations, but they seem to be few and far between.
A very big issue in Australia is the money given to Aboriginal people, which they end up using to buy beer and get drunk. This is also the case with many Native American in reservations. Both of these situations arise from giving money to people who want something else - the feeling that they have power over their own life. These examples are extreme, but they illustrate the issue well.
Don’t get me wrong, from the point of view of the person donating, this is great. It’s an act of kindness and sharing and it feels really good. However, from the point of view of the recipient, more often than not it develops a dependence on others and takes their power away.
I would like to encourage you to donate to organizations that build and empower individuals and communities, rather than giving money to people. If you can, instead of giving money, volunteer your time and support the needy by teaching them skills and encouraging them to be self-sufficient as much as possible.
In recent years, there is a booming industry of self-proclaimed personal growth gurus, who claim to be able to unparalleled impart wisdom on the masses without leaving the comfort of their home, through the Internet or the telephone or maybe from the stage. To a certain extent, this works, because many more people get information and knowledge they could not afford or technically access otherwise.
But here’s the problem: much of what we need to discover in life is PERSONAL, and no matter how good a public program is, personal growth is, well, personal. So these programs do a great job of awakening people and giving them a taste of something good. You don’t know what you don’t know, right? So sampling some personal growth goodies, getting an overview of this, that and the other, and even spending some serious time following somebody’s program are all good things, but they are only the beginning.
To really get your life in gear, you have to deal with your own baggage and make sense of it - remove limiting beliefs, change focus, set goals, build relationship skills - based on who you are and what YOU want.
To do this, I highly recommend working with a life coach.
A life coach is a professional friend. It’s someone who cares for you and guides you with a method. It’s someone who has collected ideas and possible solutions from working with many people and can gently direct you towards finding your own best way forward.
I’ve personally been coached 3 times already. Each time, I grew tremendously as a person. Each time, I opened up and became happier than ever before. Each time, I learned new things and acquired new skills to handle my time, my business, my relationships and my emotions. It was brilliant!
The nicest thing for me about coaching was that it transferred the power in my life into my hands. I had not realized how powerful I was until I sat down and faced my mental blocks head on, took ownership of my feelings and let go of what other people felt and did. Many of the concepts were strange to me at first, but ultimately, I learned to focus on what works.
In the past, people wanted to be respected, to be wealthy, to be famous or to have “a good job”. Nowadays, most people just want to be happy. In essence, life coaching is an excellent way to work on a personal level with another human being and learn how to be happy YOUR WAY.
For more on life coaching, see this life coaching page.
As a life coach, one of the things I present to people are beliefs. This word is related to religion for most people, but in life coaching, it simply means “what you consider to be true”. For example, you may have a belief that anybody taking their clothes off during a soccer game must be nuts. They might dispute this belief, but you still think it’s true.
The thing with beliefs is that we make decisions based on them. So you might expect people to confirm their beliefs and validate them before using them to decide what to do, especially in matters of importance. Well, as scary as this may seem, they don’t. Oh, and neither do you.
You see, our beliefs are very dear to us, so we protect them. They are dear to us because they make our world more predictable and understandable and thus safer. So when we were born, we hurried up and absorbed beliefs from our environment - from our parents, from TV, from school and pretty much everywhere else - and, in many cases, we absorbed beliefs that have nothing to do with reality and everything to do with what our parents thought, but that was fine for us, because we didn’t know any better.
So far, what I’ve described is natural and happens to everyone. What happens next is that our beliefs determine our behavior and therefore the results we get. If we were told as kids “You’re no good at sports”, we stay away from sports, and then we put on weight. If we were told as kids “Wow, you do math so easily”, we do more math, so we become even better at it, until we become accountants.
Yet, as we grow up, most of us get a feeling that life could be better. There’s got to be more to life than working 8-6 (anyone still remember 9-5?), facing a computer all day long and trying to have a life during weekends and annual leave. So we read books on change and we go to seminars and we listen to audio programs and some of us even see a life coach (they’re the ones that get the best results, by the way), and we do our best to change.
So here’s a great exercise for you, which you can do as often as you like, whenever you have some time to yourself.
- Find a quiet spot (sorry, all my “do it yourself” tips start with this bit)
- Take a few deep, long breathes
- On a piece of paper, write down the question “What kind of a person am I?”
- As fast as you can, without picking up the pen from the paper, write down as many answers as you can. If you get stuck, scribble. Keep at it for 3 minutes
- Each of the statements you have written is a belief. For each belief
- Ask yourself “Is this helping me to think of myself like this?”
- If your answer is “no”, find exceptions to the statement, i.e. examples of when it is not true
- Ask yourself “What would be a better (more empowering) way to think of myself?”
- Write an alternative statement and feel its power
If you need some help sorting out your beliefs, seek the help of a life coach. This is what life coaches do for a living and you’ll be happy you did.
Yesterday, I met a young man for the first time for a life coaching session. He told me a little bit about himself, and one of the things that stood out for me was that he was 21 years old and said he was going to have a baby soon. Throughout the session, I noticed he seemed to be worried, and whenever I mentioned his imminent parenthood, he sank in his chair and his face fell.
Now, my own 3 kids are a source of pure joy and pride for me and, being an experienced father and a parenting coach, I felt I needed to say something to make him feel easier.
So I traveled back in my head to one of my favorite moments in time, when the paediatrician finished examining my first born, wrapped her up snuggly in her first-ever clothes and handed her to me. There I was, dreading the huge responsibility for a totally helpless human being, worried sick about my best friend, who was being stitched up from her C-section operation, and exhausted from 30 hours of labor.
I reached out, held the little bundle in my arms and brought her close to my chest. Her warmth spread through my body and suddenly, everything was alright. Not knowing what the world is like, not being able to do even the simplest things, my new daughter has the amazing ability to make everything right just be being there.
I looked at her, tears welling up in my eyes, and said, “You know, I don’t know you yet, but already I love you so much” (here I go dropping a tear again as I write - sniff, sniff).
So I told the young man this, “Let me make parenting really simple for you. If something could be dangerous, don’t do it. Stop and ask someone. If it isn’t dangerous, go ahead and do it and then see what happens. More than anything, remember that your kid will need your love in order to grow. She (he is having a daughter too) will do the rest, so be guided by her responses”.
He relaxed and smiled.
