Purpose and Meeting Needs

What is your purpose? What are you alive for in this moment? The operative word being “for”.

Think about when you are feeling “on purpose”. You will find that it is synonymous with having your deepest needs met.

They are met through the medium of your actions operating through a particular form.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking your purpose is something that you are to DO. It’s more a question of what you NEED, and then having the desire to fufill that need, forms will become apparent to you that meet the task.

New = Challenge = Opportunity

If you want to change something in your life, then inevitably it will be NEW to you. Being NEW it will be a CHALLENGE, and within a challenge sits an OPPORTUNITY waiting to be invited out.

So decide on something that you wish to change. Then ask yourself, “What is the challenge in this for me?” (e.g. it may be a challenege to believe that you can).

Then ask yourself, “In meeting that challenge, what is the opportunity this provides me with?”

At which point you are ready act.

Questions are useless without Open-ness

A great deal of coaching revolves around asking questions. Questions are seen as the doorways into possibility. And they are. A question can open up an new thread, or shift our perspective, or change the meaning…

But without an open-ness to receive the question fully, and to respond as objectively and as bare-facedly as we can, then all we really get is more of the same.

So, when you ask yourself a question such as: what do I want to achieve this week?

…let the question come in anew. Address it with a clean slate. In responding to the question, consider yourself anew too!

What would progress look like?

It is often the case, that there is no need to focus on the “problem” as such.

Instead, focus on what progress would look like.

For example, if you were wanting to be more organised at work, you could spend a lot of time examining the causes of your dislike etc etc etc.

On the other hand, if you decide that progress – for you – would be, say, planning your day in the morning, seeing work being ticked off as it’s done…then your only job is to do that.

In doing that, you may well find that the challenge (of disliking organising) will come up as you go about this new approach.

That gives you the opportunity of learning about yourself, growing and moving into the new in real-time.

Tactics of Not-Seeing

There are some issues/challenges that we know are there but which we choose not to see.

Whenever we try and deal with it, something happens to throw a spanner in the works.  Often, it results in a distraction of sorts.  The end result being that it has “slipped out of our fingers”.

The best way to hold our focus on an issue long enough to work with it, is to stop running away from it.

We can stop running away by firstly realising that we are running away.  No-one else is doing this.  Pull back the curtain – yep, it’s me.

Now, we may have good reason for running away and not-seeing.  Accepting ourselves and our actions sometimes seems monumentally difficult.

That said, the only way we are really going to change something, is if we know what it is.

We don’t need to have it all worked out.  But we do need to have a firm grip on the object of our change.

Have a play around with an issue that has been around for a while with you.  Place your focus on it to handle it and notice the ways you quickly let it go.  Keep doing it and noticing your tactics.  Notice that these are your tactics. It is your choice to see or not-see.  You decide.

Today’s workshop challenge:threads of potential

Sit down and pull out as many threads of potential that you can.

Get them onto paper. Feel your way. Remember old dreams, desires and set-aside inklings. What were they about? What lights your fire? Floats your boat? Who, do you have it IN you to become? What would you fix in the world? What challenge has dogged you through life? What would be true of you if you faced that? Stand tall in your mind, in your heart, in your body. Feel the YOU in all it’s potential and essential glory. Breath into it. Let the feelings soak into you. They are not in vain. They point to a journey. A fork in the road. A line to be crossed. A decision made.

When you have finished this challenge – thank yourself and your essence for sharing itself.

A sobering question.

We often say that we want to live to our potential, but what if you already were?

How would you know? And how could you find out?  Is that even possible?

No-one needs coaching…

In my humble opinion, no-one needs coaching.

What we need, and I fully include myself in this, is an honest and objective mirror, so that I can see what I am doing – and hold it, long enough to learn and act.

Most of us simply do not want to witness the reality of where we are at, preferring the fantasy of where we wish we were.

Consequently, we float in a no man’s land between the two.

Yet seeing where we are at, without judgement, is the greatest gift we can enjoy.

Then we can see, then we can learn, then we can choose, then we can act, then we can move – and live!

bare-faced coach: why?

Welcome to the bare-faced coach workshop.

Why “bare-faced” coaching?  Because bare-faced means “no effort to conceal” and in this regard, I’m referring to self-concealment and it’s many forms.

I have yet to meet someone, particularly a client, who does not want to express, bring through, a felt potential within themselves.  The question is: what gets in the way of that?

In a nutshell, we get in our own way in ways, so subtle, that we choose not to see what we are doing.

The moment we see what we are doing, and see that we created that, then we are in a position to begin untying the knot we have tied ourselves in.

That is why “bare-faced”.  It’s about a focus on seeing ourselves as clearly and objectively as we can, so that we can learn and act to get some real movement in the direction our heart calls for.