Life coaching in Russia is popular today as never before. Some people even suggest to create a new term homo therapeuticus — a person who is eager to understand his own feelings, emotions, to follow its dynamics with the help of a specialist and change this way his life for good. It means being good mannered in our days. Our new columnist, practicing life and transaction analytics coach, Tatiana Akulich is telling how to help people see perspective and choose to move forward.
People coming to me can be divided into three categories. First want to change something but have no idea of what exactly. Others have variants of choice but don’t know what to start with. Third have both but they are not decisive enough to make a first step even if it is very small. How to go on developing, what to do in this life and where to move is a main request of the modern man. Coaching attitude supposes help on the way of self researching and self teaching. Specialist helps to light up the potential of a person, the knowledge and strong side he or she already has. Starting to open and learn more about himself the one who is consulted steps on the path of reviving the faith in his own strength and accumulating resource.
The change of activity, position, material status, acquiring the necessary skills and competences — all leads to the inner dynamics. Whatever is happening in the working sphere, personal one will be changed the same way. Human life is an ecosystem and no matter how one divides it into different parts there’s a behavioural pattern that is played in each of them.
There’s a riddle in anyone of us and my goal as of a coach is to find it, analyze and solve with the one who came for consultation. Thus I accomplish the mission of taking him to another level of self understanding: who am I, who will I be after reaching my goal, what will I gain as a result? The true goal understanding is very important. Immediate task of a coach is to establish the atmosphere of safety and support, mutual respect and trust helping the person to tell in the end that he found his real aim he is seeking for.
Interesting fact, a big quantity of people coming to sessions don’t see the vector of further developing for the reason of lost life taste and big emotional hunger. In this case request for working out and analyzing becomes the topic of reconstructing the connection to one’s sensitive and emotional world. With a plain life on the background and turning business wheel someone suddenly stops and says to himself, ‘I forgot when I recently felt any emotion’. And the question ‘What do I feel now?’ has no answer. There’s a family, job, children, but there’s no drive and happiness in life. There’s a need for changes but there’s no understanding of how to approach them and from which side. Emotional burnout doesn’t let see the perspec-tive and direction for the movement. Men and women both suffer from this. Men were told in their childhood that they are stronger and have to lead. They shouldn’t cry like girls and ought to hide their feelings and emotions. To follow the route with the consulted person till the moment in childhood when the “inner child” preserved its emotionality and to help the feelings be let out free means to find a key to freedom and redecision ‘I’m alive and I have a right to feel and live through the different emotions’. It is also important to wake up the Child-like ego state because this is where the big potential lays, freedom, emotions, wishes, creativity, ability to make something and choose what is deeply wanted. Together we change the vector of modality from “must”, “has to” to “wants” and as a result all decisions are taken easily and naturally.
Women have the same inner battle between “wants” and “has to”. Their indecisiveness is also caused by childhood presets. A girl should be modest. Stay back, don’t get ahead, give way, don’t impose. At the same time women are flexible and open by their nature. We get slowed down by a crazy quantity of fears. We are depending on outside references our surrounding is never stingy for. Who doesn’t know that feeling of falling down being said, ‘You know, you could have done it better, don’t you’?
Examining the series of “sacred” questions, ‘what did bring you there where you are now, what did bring you to doubts about yourself, what did lead you to situation where you’ve got all you desired except of drive and happiness?’ we build a general picture of life. These questions help to understand the strong sides and the ones we’d like to make stronger. If we focus on achievements, one usually gets inspired and an inner source switches on in him, grade of self sureness grows and life energy appears. The choice becomes closer.
One girl came to me with a topic of lower level of success and self sureness in all horizons, professional and personal life were not succeeding. I asked her one of the “sacred” questions and told her to talk about her life achievements. For fifteen minutes we’ve been writing a list of her achievements, then I gave the same information as a feedback lightning up the contradictions. It turned out that with all of her dislike of conflicts she decided the hardest of them many times and, for example, never estimated situation as a hopeless one. She just acted and solved it. That evening she thought of herself in a different mode, ‘I can!’ Next morning I got a call from her and she said, ‘I wrote a list of fifty-one achievements and this is not the limit yet. And I solved the problems with my business partner and I smile’.
Diffidence gives birth to an impostor complex, another Achilles’ heel of the modern man living in a vast internet space where any knowledge can be reached immediately. We see ourselves as not perfect yet because we can always get a little bit more of this or of that new skill, become more of a spe-cialist. Even after mastering a profession we go to get communicative and psychological skills. Availability of knowledge is a huge plus and at the same time the possibility of turning into the ‘eternal student’. Coaching helps peo-ple to become sure of knowing themselves as of personalities and find earth under their feet.
My story of success had a moment of this kind. Once my acquaintance told me, ‘As long as you will go on studying but not sharing the knowledge you have with others, it will get rotten inside of you same as a fish thrown onto the shore’. My imagination immediately drew a picture of the fish and this pushed me to open the door of professional activity.
Coaching is my big passion and one of the reasons I feel like waking up in the morning. I feel necessity of doing something by my existence, attention, knowledge, support and help for other people. I went through this route, tried the effectiveness of the method by myself before and felt its freeing affect, so now I want to bring this knowledge to other people. Victor Frankl once said, ‘The meaning of my life is to bring meaning to other people’s lives’. It is about the idea of serving, a notion close to my heart.
