Foster Self Awareness _Final

>> Sigmund Freud once said, "The mind is like an iceberg. It floats with only one-seventh of its bulk above water." Self-awareness is conscious knowledge of one's own character, feelings, motives, and desires. It's how well and how much you tap into that iceberg that sits below the surface. Self-awareness isn't something you have or you don't, it's something that you possess on a spectrum. Also, it's inconsistent. You may be highly self-aware in some areas of your life but have huge blind spots in others. In a sense, self-awareness is a choice. You can make the decision to journey deeper and get to the root of who you are and why you do what you do, or you can choose to stay at the surface, complacent and detached from your core. As a coach, your job is to help your clients discover the blind spots in their lives. This takes patience and perseverance because you can't force your clients to become aware. They have to be ready and willing to dig deeper. This is why it's important to only work with clients who are motivated. If they're not willing to do this inner work, your time together just won't be very productive. Facing the aspects of ourselves that we try to hide from our consciousness can be painful, uncomfortable, and downright ugly. So I recommend explaining to prospective clients that this is part of the process of coaching, and then assess if they're really ready to go there. If you convey to your prospective clients that change can't come without first taking an honest look at who you are and why you do what you do, you'll weed out those who aren't truly ready to change, and you'll end up working with motivated ideal clients. Helping your clients expand their self-awareness is so important because through this space you can help them to recognize patterns in their thoughts and behaviors that manifest repeatedly in their lives, understand why they do what they do, call themselves out on their lies and excuses, identify and replace limiting beliefs and biased perspectives, follow through on their intentions to stay accountable, and understand and own the consequences of their actions or inactions. To help your clients tap into their self-awareness, I'll share with you the 10 key ingredients for cultivating self-awareness. One, willingness to be honest with oneself. It can be hard to admit, but when you're living out of line with where and who you want to be, you end up lying to yourself all the time. You know how ignorance is bliss? This totally applies here. When you're just honest with yourself, you're living in denial. Once you call yourself out on these lies, denial becomes uncomfortable, and you can't unknow what you figured out. You can try to crawl deeper into denial which will backfire or you can use this information to heal yourself. The latter is, of course, what we want for our clients. Becoming self-aware, it means signing up to unmask our lies and expose our inner truths. Ask your clients if they're ready to do this. It's your job to challenge them. Number two, commit to sitting in the deep end. The road to inner wisdom is bumpy. It takes time and perseverance. When things get scary, it's a natural reaction to want to pullback and retreat to safer ground, its how our brains are wired. When things get heavy for our clients, we may get the urge to jump in and try to soothe them to ease the discomfort rather than encourage them to have a long, ugly cry and stay in the moment. To help them expand their self-awareness, we must commit to staying in the moment and gently bring your clients back when they get sidetracked or they try to back away. Number three, the ability to maintain perspective. When you uncover something new about yourself, the shock of it can cause you to blow it out of proportion, especially if it's negative or disappointing. In the moment, it may feel devastating to a client to arrive at a particular conclusion, and they might react like, "Oh my God, my life is over." It's your job to hold their hand through the process and remind them that anything they uncover about themselves can either be worked through or overcome. Remind them that they're still the same person they were yesterday and they'll still be that same amazing person again tomorrow. Number four, open-minded curiosity. This is something that will also help your clients to keep things in perspective. As a coach, you're trained to listen and learn about your clients with genuine open-minded curiosity or what you learned about in the Health Coach Training Program as a beginner's mind. Just as he benefited from learning how to adopt to beginner's mind, your clients can also benefit from adopting this kind of approach for themselves as they listen to their own inner wisdom and truth. You can help your client see this by encouraging them to look at themselves to the eyes of a small child. Young children, who are still forming their understanding of the world, taking new information with wide eyes and open minds. Have you ever introduced a new concept or an object to a child? Likely, they responded to you with a series of questions. Instead of making assumptions, they curiously investigate it and explore this new thing without placing their own labels on it. Whether through a gentle prompt or a full on guided meditation, encourage your client to step outside of themselves and look upon this new information with the eyes of a child. Encourage them to ask questions as their child self to their actual self, and to respond back to their child self the way an adult would, gently, with kind words, and simple explanations. Number five, intuition. Often, the best way to tap into what's going on with yourself is to feel your truth rather than think about or analyze it. Our bodies are wise and they hold all of our stories and answers. Teach your clients to pay attention to the sensations in their bodies when they're thinking about or discussing emotionally charged material. Ask them throughout the process what's going on in their bodies. What kind of sensations are they experiencing in their stomach, limbs, or chests? Is there maybe a tingling in their hands or butterflies in their stomach as they weigh their options about some big decision? This is their body trying to tell them something. Encourage them to notice and share this kind of stuff with you as it occurs. We're so cerebral in our modern society, and life moves so fast for many of us that these important clues often go completely unnoticed. These sensations are intuitive messages from our bodies, and they can tell us a lot about what's going on. Instruct your clients to approach these feelings with that childlike perspective, and think about what they could mean without thinking too hard about what they should mean. Number six, a stable self concept. This might seem a little obvious but it's worth mentioning. In order to understand yourself, you need to have a pretty consistent opinion of who you are. We all have our up and down days, and that's totally normal. But overall, a client who has a more stable self-concept is better equipped to conceptualize what's going on below the surface. To help clients who feel lost about who they are and what they want in life, support them with various activities and handouts that can help them get in touch with their core values, interests, and aspects of their personality. For example, the worksheet "Who Am I?" is a great resource that you can also use with your clients to help them get in touch with what they value most in their lives. You can also encourage your clients to journal, collage, or keep a Pinterest board to express themselves through. If you're working with someone, and they aren't sure what they even like or want in their life, help them get creative and brainstorm a list of possibilities they might be interested in exploring. Then prompt them to go out there and give it a whirl. Even if they hate everything they try, it'll still be useful because they'll learn about what they don't like, which will help bring them closer to what they do. Number seven, a self-aware coach. When two people who lack self-awareness work together, it can be like the blind leading the blind. Self-awareness is a critical aspect of your coaching presence. When you learn how to understand the biases and pitfalls of your own thinking, you become able to see how your thinking can either help or hurt your clients. Your own self-awareness provides a blank slate for your clients to reflect and rebuild themselves upon. To be fully present for your clients, pay attention not only to how they process their thoughts and feelings but also how you do this for yourself. Your potential to create awareness in others can only be as great as your own. This is why we place so much emphasis in this course on getting to know yourself on every level. Over the next few months, we'll do lots of work around becoming more self-aware, so you can show up fully for your clients and be of best service to them. Number eight, silence. Self-awareness is born and blooms in the long silences between what is said. When you let a question hang in the air or take a long pause after saying something to your clients, you let the magic happen. Self-awareness happens when your clients are reflecting and processing not when you're talking. So when you sit through those uncomfortable moments and give things the opportunity to simmer, you're giving your clients the space to reflect on their inner worlds and become more self-aware. At times, this can be more valuable than any words. Ride out the urge to talk and let this wonderful process unfold. Nine, patience. For some clients, despite your best efforts and theirs, it can take a long time for them to establish a deep connection with themselves, longer than either of you may like. It's important for both of you to stay patient. This involves being realistic and reminding both yourself and your client that getting to know oneself is a lifelong process. Be happy if your clients emerge from your program having taken away even one or two key insights. This is part of the process and shouldn't be undervalued. These little gems of wisdom that they gain about themselves are building blocks, and they can take them with them into their lives. Helping your clients walk away from coaching with even just one of them provides a foundation for them to continue to grow. Coaching isn't just about how much you're able to help a client while you work together, it's just as much about how well you set them up for success once you've parted ways. Number 10, an empathetic coach. Putting yourself in your client's shoes will help them become more aware. How so? When you connect and tap into your client's experience, you listen better and without bias, and you really get the gist of what they're feeling. From this place, you're able to ask more powerful and targeted high-mileage questions, and this can help your clients focus better and access their core feelings and motives. When you help awareness emerge, you can help convert it into action. When you share your client's experience and guide them to a place where a light bulb goes off for them, ask them, "What would you like to do now at this new awareness?" Even if they don't want to do anything with it, that's totally fine. What you've done here is stood alongside them as a partner and gently nudged them to realize something about themselves. You've reminded them that they're now even more capable to act than they were before. In this state of alignment, your client will work to move forward when they feel that it's safe and appropriate to do so, knowing that you'll be there to get them and support them. So have I increased your awareness about self-awareness? I hope so. We've covered a lot, so let's recap. Self-awareness is knowing your inner self. The stuff that, at your core, makes you, you. Self-awareness is critical in coaching because the lasting change comes from understanding why you do the things you do that keep you stuck. There are 10 key ingredients to help your clients tap into their self-awareness, and they are, willingness to be honest with oneself, a commitment to go deep, the ability to keep things in perspective, open-minded curiosity, intuition, stable self-concept, a self-aware coach, silence, patience, and empathy. You should now feel more prepared to work effectively with your clients to help them tap into their self-awareness. You'll get better and better at this over time with practice. And through this course, as we help you get even deeper in touch with your own self in the modules ahead. Are you excited for this process to unfold? I know I am, and I can't wait to see you share insights with the group. Thanks so much for watching. Bye for now.