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Guest Post: Life Coaching, Life Transforming

I have been working with Chriszean, a remarkably determined teenager from Philippines for more than 3 months. I was impressed by the quality of his work and the level of determination he displayed, so I asked him to write a guest blog-post. Here it is:

“It’s been more than a hundred days since a new chapter of my life has emerged, and my life has been completely transformed. Deciding to open and read a very powerful inspirational and motivational book is one thing that marked the beginning of my life transformation, and I firmly believe that is an essential part of God’s great plan for my life, for it has helped me to a great extent in my personal development, self-improvement, and my overall well-being. During these moments, I’ve decided to navigate through my inner self on a deeper level through the help of life coaching where I discovered and explored some of my life goals such as becoming the best version of myself and living my life to the fullest as well as gaining clarity on my massive transformative life purpose which is living to glorify God and bringing hope to the world. Besides, I’ve also established some gigantic goals that helped me to avoid settling for good enough, but always aiming for the best.

This article includes a summary of the various essential key takeaways that every coaching session unfolds.

Effective and Efficient Time Management

Time management is a challenge to almost everyone. With too much to do and too little time to do everything you want to do, we usually experience stress levels soaring. We all need to fulfill our responsibilities, but there is a time for everything, and the use of effective and efficient time management strategies such as prioritizing, overcoming overthinking, and even allowing yourself to have enough time to rest, play a fundamental role in helping you perform better in daily activities and tasks, avoid burnout, and achieve more balance in life.

Fear Management

Many people encounter self-limiting beliefs and self-doubt as major obstacles or roadblocks that hinder them from pursuing their goals and desires and strive for the pinnacle of success. Feeling a sense of fear is perfectly natural, for our minds are programmed to have a fight or flight response. Fear is extremely powerful, and it can affect a person both positively and negatively, and can be used to our advantage for it can help us feel more motivated in achieving our goals in a way that we feel a sense of achievement, fulfillment, and satisfaction once we achieved this certain goal that we are constantly aiming for. Fear can make our journey towards our goals more exciting and thrilling, but not to the point that we’ll feel agitation and apprehension, similar to riding an extreme ride on an amusement park. It might be challenging to manage feelings of fear and self-doubt, but I firmly believe the famous quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that the only person we are destined to become is the person we decide to be, thus we should control our emotions, and never let our emotions control us. We are the captain of our ship and the master of our fate. We can create a life that we want. We can’t choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond.

Profound Secrets in Living Life to the Fullest

What is life? We might not have similar answers to that question, but in my personal opinion, life is God’s greatest gift! We live not only for the sake of living, but we live for a purpose. I firmly believe that everyone has a strong desire to live the life they want and live their lives to the fullest. Throughout the coaching series, I tried to navigate through some of the profound secrets in living life to the fullest.

1. Always have faith in God and believe in yourself.

Having a strong and unbreakable faith in God together with believing in your abilities and capabilities creates an enormously powerful instrument in battling, facing, and overcoming life’s challenges.

2. Don’t take life too seriously.

Learn to enjoy, and go with the flow rather than go against the flow.

3. Have the desire and willingness to achieve desired outcomes, but learn to embrace and enjoy the process at the same time.

It’s exceedingly necessary to avoid having our entire focus on the product, but rather enjoy the process which is a great way in developing a growth mindset for there is a wide range and variety of life lessons that we can learn from the process per se.

4. Use life’s challenges as stepping stones instead of obstacles.

There is always a brighter side that we must figure out, and keep our focus on. There are numerous and various blessings in disguise.

Fortifying Our Faith in God

Grit and determination are exceptionally powerful in building a sturdy foundation towards achieving and accomplishing goals and desires. As a person who always wants to achieve, the value for achievement and recognition is something natural to me. I’m highly inspired by successful people-because they maximized their time, to the point where I forget to remember the true definition and meaning of success which is not all about getting what you want but also becoming the person that God has called you to be. Every time I see some of my goals falling apart, I sometimes feel like it’s the end of the world, and I sometimes forget to remember to trust and believe in God and His great plans, plans to prosper us, and not to harm us, plans to give us hope and a future.

Keeping the Right Balance

Nearly everything in life requires a balance, and it’s very significant to maintain a well-balanced life.

1. Taking Control and Going with the Flow

Your life is very similar to a ship, and you are the captain. If you just go to where the waves take you, you might not reach your desired destination.

2. Achievement and Enjoyment

Achievement and enjoyment are two interconnected things, and it’s highly similar to balancing discipline and relaxation and even finding the right balance between work and rest.

3. Positive and Negative

Life portrays a mixture of positive and negative things. Positive things remind us to be grateful and thank God for everything that we have while negative things help us acknowledge God’s power in our lives.

4. Contentment and Discontentment

Contentment is considered an extremely essential key in achieving happiness in life. However, being too contented might pave the way to mediocrity, thus it’s important for us to learn the art of contentment and discontentment at the same time to keep searching for better and greater things.”

One of Chriszean’s goals is to write for a living, so please be so kind as to give him some feedback on his writting in the comments.

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Depression might actually be an ancient cleansing process

You feel so bad about yourself during a depressed period that when energy and inspiration come back, there is no more fear of making a fool out of yourself and you act with a different flavour of courage.

Depression has a bad name. And for anybody who is suffering from it there is a good reason for that.

But there’s another dimension to depression: underneath the painful experience of self-doubt and discouragement we might just find an ancient evolutionary process.

For efficiency’s sake, I will use some academically unacceptable shortcuts:

the Ego and the Self

The psychological identity we create for ourselves can be called an ego. It arrises from our need to identify as separate individuals. The way we build this ego is through our life experience. Based on a number of factors, we might be more or less inclined to over-inflate this ego.

Once over-inflated, it becomes part of a vicious circle that removes it even more from touch with reality which in turn gives it more reasons to artificially inflate.

At a more fundamental level of our being there is what C. G. Jung calls the Self which he defines as an all encompassing identity that unites the ego with the unconscious.

It is the integration of self and ego that can be identified at a psychological level with the evolutionary goal of life. It can be likened to the Middle Path in Buddhism.

But our outside world is not made for the self, it’s made for the ego. Society, its norms and standards, marketing, academia-they’re mainly directed towards the ego. So naturally, the ego sometimes takes over the ship with little regard for balance or moderation. So the only way the self can rebalance our psychological system is by sabotaging the ego’s foundations like self-esteem, memory, concentration, vital energy, etc. The only way our deeper self can depressurise our inflated ego is self-sabotage.

Letting go

Isn’t that what depression feels like? self-sabotage? The good news is that if we accept it as a guide instead of fighting it, depression will walk us through some of our most painful realisations, but it will eventually deliver us to a lighter, more open and more authentic psychological reality. It strips us of our masks, defence mechanisms, fake images about ourselves. Of course if we try to hold on to them, it will hurt. It will feel like you’re loosing something. But once you let go, it’s like being born again.

This is the desired outcome of any therapeutic process. LETTING GO…. of our image of ourselves so that we can fully engage with reality. It may take years of therapy and sometimes medication, but it can also happen in a second. Actually it does happen in a second, but some of us might feel they need to do years of practice before. Don’t get me wrong, I am a huge fan of practice, but I also know how over-preparation is the enemy of actually doing something.

Practicing letting go, of our patterns, our defence mechanisms, our personas is going to increase our ability to let go and be present to the moment. Preparing for said practice will increase our preparation skills. Not necessarily our ability to let go. Unless we practice letting go while we prepare for that practice… See where I’m going?

Letting go basically means seeing life from a different vantage point than that in which we are identified with a mental image of ourselves and compare that image to what we perceive to be the reality around us.

Flowing

We’ve all had those moments of just going with the flow. Where it seems like what you think is fully aligned with what you are doing, where there is almost no judgement and everything seems clear.

Different authors call it different names. In psychology it’s flow, in Christianity it’s kenosis, in Buddhism it’s sunyata new age spiritual teachers call it presence… And in my experience, it is not something you can replicate through a process- I’m still journaling and measuring my degree of let’s call it presence in correlation with other factores, but with little success in actually identifying a link.

Depression is the process that balances out our over-inflation of and over-identification with the ego. It allows us or better said forces us to systematically questions all our patterns and identifications and see which suit our purpose and which don’t.

It is an ancient process of integration involving both our individualised (masculine, rational) ego and our more collective (feminine, intuitive) self that allows us to experience life more fully, without constantly ruminating about the experience.

This is why I think that through integrating depression into our growth toolset, we gain a very powerful and very deep process for self-acceptance and self-improvement.

More about accepting and performance in this article.

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A quarantine induced guide to letting go

All this sitting at home puts a lot of things in perspective

After having to give up most of life’s daily activities because of the quarantine, I realize how many of those daily activities were just time and energy being spent on auto-pilot.

Some context- (if you’re in a hurry jump to The Guide)

My wife and I are both 30 and we have a 7-year-old daughter and a 7-month-old son. We usually live in a 2 bedroom apartment in a pretty nice condominium close to Bucharest’s northern business area, where my office is located.

I grew up in a middle-class family in Bucharest and had a rather uneventful upbringing. After marrying Ramona and having Sissi, 7 years ago, I had my first real shock. My father who had been the pillar of the family and what seemed to me at that time an invincible figure had a heart attack and suddenly died -leaving my sister and me with a business -12 million euros in debt. We knew the business was struggling, but we didn’t know the extent of the financial burden.

The business we inherited is an automotive dealership and unfortunately, I’m not in any way passionate about the automotive business butI am really passionate about people development so I said I could try using my skills inside the company until it’s back on its feet and .then follow my own path..

Luckily, being at the beginning of an economic upturn, with the help of some inspired decisions on our part and valuable support from other stakeholders we managed to turn the business around.

After my father’s death, but before engaging in turning our inherited business around, I experienced what at that time my therapist called an acute anxious-depressive episode but what I later realized was a reality-facing “episode” where my fantasy of being special and having it all figured out got pushed out by the reality of having to manage my father’s failing business or risk losing all the comfort it had been fragilely providing.

Letting go brings relief

I will always remember a conversation I had with my wife on our terrace when we just found out our apartment was being repossessed by the bank(because the debt the business was in). She asked me: Is the house your family has in the countryside mortgaged in any way? -No -Then worst-case scenario, we move there with Sissi, we plant our food, buy a cow and some chickens and we don’t need much more, right?

She was overemphasizing a point, but I still distinctly remember feeling a huge relief, like a weight was being slowly but surely lifted off my chest. My wife was there for me. She supported me through these tough times, and as long as that was the case, I had absolutely nothing to fear. We didn’t need the status a fancy apartment, car, or CEO position was providing. All we needed was each other’s support, health, and a clear mind.

Armed with that perspective, I asked my sister to take over the business for a couple of months, enrolled in Alain Cardon’s coaching school and came out of it 3 months later a new man: PRESENT, authentic, self-assured and focused on the essentials in life: like the time I spend with my family, the non-judgmental presence I offer people and organizations, connecting to nature, having adventures, writing about my experiences and sharing them with other people, listening to people’s stories, and helping out my community in the real hands-on way…  It was bliss…

You need a certain kind of consciousness to keep letting go

Coming back to work, I had the clarity I needed to continue the turnaround my sister and I started,  and make our company successful. This was mid-2014… Since 2015 our profit has been growing steadily and before this Corona thing happened, my wife Ramona and I were already engaged in buying a bigger apartment, more expensive stuff, having dinner in hip places in town, buying each other designer clothes, expensive jewelry, and what-not- so the usual stuff people are doing when business is going well.

Nothing wrong so far, but while we were spending like there’s no tomorrow, I was also taking classes at Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, researching different methods of managing compost in the apartment, trying different methods to repair instead of just buying new stuff, focusing my company’s culture towards sustainability and so on…

At some point, towards the end of 2018 things started feeling a bit off… I started having less and less of that bliss feeling and more and more a feeling that I didn’t have time to do anything… Everything I did was in a rush: from brushing my teeth to the meetings I was having with my team…

Life tends to give us what we need

Even when this quarantine started, I was jumping from one task to another, juggling personal and professional tasks at the same time, having half my mind focused on what I am missing and the other half jumping from trying to be present to judging myself for not being present.

I realized then that this is my deeper self letting me know that it’s been 7 years already since my last reality check and that it’s time to refresh it. I knew that it’s only up to me if this reality check (aka depression) period would last a week, a month or a year so I started thinking hard about what I needed to accept as my new reality.

While this was all happening inside me, we were forced to reduce capacity in our business and only focus on essential services in order to keep our people safe and adapt to the new market conditions set by the quarantine. I noticed two things during this period:

  • we were making less money but also spending less money so the bottom line was more or less the same;
  • and people didn’t need me. They were all doing their jobs just fine, while I was feeling  I was getting in their way rather than being supportive.

It struck me: that’s what was off… We had already turned the company around We were making a profit, we automated what needed automation and people were doing their jobs, but instead of keeping it focused on its core business,  delegating the executive role and pursuing my interests, I was trying to push my interests (coaching, deep-sustainability, holistic education) while also managing day to day operations. I was holding the company back from doing what it was doing best, just because I was clinging to my CEO role (and salary) and my passions at the same time.

I see nothing wrong in clinging to my passions so the natural step would be to let go of my role as a CEO. And #lettinggo is one of the most liberating actions that I could have ever made.

The Guide

We’re all insecure.  And almost none of us like uncertainty. That’s mainly why we hide our insecurities behind different kinds of masks and it’s mainly why we are attracted by people and life choices that give us a sense of security.

We need to get comfortable with uncertainty and the only way to get comfortable with something is accepting it as a reality instead of inventing tools to make us feel safe and secure. Living it, instead of running away from it… It’s like the cold weather: if you fight it and tighten-up it feels you are doing something but you are making it worse, but if you accept it and breathe into it your body adapts and cold is more bearable. Provided that you are not exposed to a temperature that is beneath your physical ability to bear in which case…

We need to act! And this is where it gets tricky. Action just for the sake of action is bound to put us on a hamster wheel that can easily turn into a rat race… But not acting because we are uncertain about the best course of action is equally dangerous because it puts us in a frozen state that is why…

We need to stay conscious. This means we should make being present in our body a priority, meditating more, thinking less compulsively and more strategically.

Think of what is truly important to you. Maybe put them on paper -you can find my list here

Now think of all the things you have bought and/or invested in. What percentage really brought you what is important for you? I’m willing to bet that if the above lists were made with sincerity the answer is not many.

We need to let go of what we think we want and focus on what we feel we need!

And yes, coaching can help with this.