Connecting with who I am

I have started being coached again recently, it started because I wanted to support a trainee coach with her confidence in coaching. I could see something in her that would make her a very special coach. She is a very experienced health professional, who is self aware enough to naturally hold her own judgement and desire to help lightly, to allow her coachee to explore their thoughts and emotions without interference. She naturally holds the coachee’s space well, but just like many of us coaches she has this learned desire to solve the problem, that we all have to unlearn. That led me to engage in a coaching relationship with her. After having counselling after the loss of Mum I needed to work out how to connect back up with myself and get back to leading my life authentically. The time was right for me to have a space where I can explore what is getting in the way of me living the that meets my values.

I had my second coaching session yesterday, and the impact on me has been quite profound. After the first session I made some choices about what I needed to stop doing , to enable me to focus on what is currently important. I was studying for a coaching supervision qualification, and it is was causing me to anxious daily and was distracting me from important work that I have been doing and exacerbating the emotions I am feeling about the anniversary of my Mum’s death that is coming up at the end of the month. My choice was to stop the qualification as it was not serving me well. There was a lot of guilt, and shame about associated with giving up the course. The guilt of letting people down who had sponsored me to complete it, and my tutor and fellow students. Shame for failing and giving up, that rhetoric of being a quitter is strong. In fact the quitter rhetoric was the most destructive, and in fact was the biggest hurdle I had to overcome. That coaching session helped me confirm my thoughts about continuing something that is damaging you to avoid the shame of being a quitter is ridiculous. Saying it out loud and talking through my reasons for stopping, helped me face those feelings of shame, by being self-compassionate and curious.

As I said earlier yesterday’s coaching session was quite profound. It has been a few weeks since I had made the decision to stop the supervision course, and I am now feeling a lot lighter. I feel like I am able to see more of my world, my head is up and I am looking around. There are still pockets of anxiety around my performance, but perhaps they are useful and justified. So our coaching session centred on feeling lighter and starting to lead a more authentic, value based life. I started to explore and understand what was working for me at work and home. I am again focussing on my compassion, which is underpinned by being courageous and useful. The choices I am making about what I do are based on those two core values, does it embrace being useful and courageous. Now it does not mean that I am being overtly both these, it more than often means that I am looking for them in the work I do, for instance can I support others to be more useful and that may require them to be courageous in the process. I have been working with a few teams and individuals recently who are acting so courageously in the pursuit of making a difference and being useful to society and those around them. Working with people when this is their focus gives me such a buzz. This buzz has given me optimism for the first time in a long time. I feel optimistic about my life and life in general. Life can be fulfilling, and we can all flourish, we will face incredible challenges throughout our lives but we can flourish and ride those turbulent waters.

This has got me thinking about my coaching practice and what I offer as a coach outside of my full-time job. As you will know I offer my services as a coach privately which over recent years has focussed on supporting people to create a meaningful work-life balance. With my new insight in how I need to lead my life, this seems a little restrictive. I have also been thinking recently about how I could support people with choosing or changing careers. I think work-life balance and career coaching are in many ways completely connected, I am also realising that they mean different things to different people and can cause people a lot stress, as they may feel the need to confirm to what society says is a good work life balance and what is a worthwhile career. We tend to attach ourselves completely to what we do. I trained to be a Nurse, so when I qualified I became a Nurse. I now work as an Organisational Development Manager and Coaching Lead. So I was a Nurse and I am now a Coaching Lead. But this is not true I used to work as a Nurse and my job now is Coaching Lead. I am neither of these things, they are things I do or did for work. I am Matt Smith. This is what I want to focus my coaching on, going back to my original idea of connected coaching. This idea is that to be able to lead a fulfilling life, it is vital to understand completely and embrace who we are, what it important to us and what impact we want to make on the world. This will help us make choices about the work we do, how much time we spend doing work and how much time we spend with friends, family and leisure. There are different times in our lives when we can lose connection with ourselves, when we set out on our adult life, post full-time education whether that is after secondary school or university, then there is mid career as we reflect on the impact our life has had, and finally as we approach the end of our career and contemplate retirement. There are many other life events around these times that cause us to pause and reflect, such as the birth of children, having school age children, children leaving school, divorce, and bereavement.

With this in mind I am simplifying my offer of coaching. If you feel lost or unsatisfied in work and life, then maybe it is time to re-connect with yourself again and start making choices that are important for you and not what you think you should be doing.

If you wonder if you might benefit from re-connecting with yourself, drop me a line, we can have a conversation and find out if it is what you would want to do.

matt@mattycoach71.com