Most of the providers on the personal development market over-promise and under-deliver. The main reason for this is that if they where honest, it would be really hard for them to sell. Here’s why:
Personal development is a lifelong journey
When buying something we are used to being promised a measurable result at the end of a specified period of time with minimal effort on our part. This can certainly be achieved- maybe except the minimum effort part- with skill development.
When it comes to becoming better human beings, things are not that easy… We first need to define what better is. How we measure it. Then we need to craft ways to train in the direction we have set out for ourselves. We might at one point discover that the direction we initially set out for ourselves does not serve us anymore.
There is no finish line. And the only real measure of success is the level of satisfaction you have with your own life.
It’s not the method, it’s the relationship
While there are undoubtedly successful endeavours and we might be tempted to replicate a certain process with the hope of replicating its results, each individual is unique and accompanying someone in her development journey is more about creating an open and healthy relationship than it is about following a certain process.
The accompanying professional-let’s call him a coach- has his own biases, his own challenges and patterns. Being aware of those patterns and using them in the development work is essential for both client and coach growth.
The coach and client are recreating within their relationship the same patterns that they need to develop or manage in each of their own life situations.
It is similar to what Irwin Yalom calls “working with the here and now” or Alain Cardon’s “being present to client-coach resonance”.
This ultimately means that the coach/therapist must be vulnerable enough to admit when he is confused, overly-excited, blocked, doubtful, etc. This type of open, vulnerable relationship creates a safe space where the client is confident enough to deepen her work and take risks.
There is a catch: a safe space can very easily turn into a comfort zone if not kept in check by appropriate challenging strategies. This is where the idea of a method goes out the window. There is no way of balancing these two apparently conflicting strategies: creating a safe space and challenging the client to grow. It is only through a lot of practice in being present in the here and now, that you can start creating that balance on a regular basis. And I suspect not even the masters of the game get it right every time..
Autonomy is key
During our development process we have the tendency to delegate the responsibility of our progress to either the development process or the accompanying professional herself.
We can call it the paradox of accompanying: it is only when a client can do without a coach’s support that the work becomes valuable. Only when we as clients take full responsibility of our own development does the true development start.
However, autonomy is not something that we achieve at one point and never lose again. So paradoxically we will always benefit from having a partner that can hold us accountable to our own autonomy.
Having a purpose is great. Having clear goals- even better. But be flexible.
This is where I start mixing personal experience with my own philosophical ideas.
Clear goal setting is the basis of what we call the motivation stack. Having a life purpose and breaking that down into clear supporting goals helps us stay motivated and constantly move towards the direction we want in life.
But sometimes we set the wrong goals. Or we are too ambitious. Or not ambitious enough. Although changing your goal stack every day in order to minimise the effort needed to achieve those goals is an excellent self-sabotage strategy, so is clinging to a desired outcome without regard for what reality offers us as feedback.
The key here for me is constantly aligning on my purpose, goals, values and areas of focus and accountability. Creating a feedback loop between daily life and these rather conceptual guidelines and using discrepancies as input for my development work.
Groups are magic
Individual work is great for defining goals, overcoming basic postponement strategies, building an action plan, holding and being held accountable. If accompanied by a master, it can reveal deep patterns engrained in our psyche for generations, offer opportunities to transcend these patterns in the here and now and even help us develop the autonomy to take this work further into our daily lives.
But being in a group that has the purpose of offering a safe space for people to share their deepest fears and most challenging life-situations has an almost magical power.
A well supervised group can provide all the benefits a masterful coaching experience can, but in a more holistic way and for a fraction of the cost.
When you vulnerably share your deepest challenges with a group, especially with people you don’t know very well two things almost always happen:
- you get a sense of great relief when putting it out there. internal challenges-especially the most intimate ones seem less scary once shared. One of the main reasons is that we formulate them so they go from being a daunting mix of fears, projections and self-doubt it becomes a statement that can be fact checked, refined, or just listened to and received by others
- people in the group develop a sense of gratitude as if your sharing modelled what they needed to do. Also hearing someone vulnerably share their challenges makes it easier to live with our own. Because at a deep level, our basic challenges are the same. We all want to love and be loved. We have all experienced different challenges to this basic need, making us think that achievement, status, a certain relationship or a spiritual practice will help us fulfil this need.
To coclude…
With these conclusions and my own experience as an ICF accredited coach I enlisted the help of my wife Ramona (also a trained coach) and started building a platform that would allow us to practice these learnings with our clients and friends.
We call it RoundPeak and its purpose is creating a community of people determined to truly develop themselves and others.
This means using our own life-situations as training ground for our development, accepting ourselves the way we truly are, without making excuses or projecting over-inflated egos, and using the energy and clarity we get from accepting our life-situation to achieve specific outcomes that would improve our life-situation and hopefully other’s as well.
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