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Self-Coaching 101
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Our article “Coached to Perfection” in the January 2005 issue discusses how life coaches are helping people change their lives. But some experts say you don’t need to hire a pro to help you make changes; instead, self-coaching can get you where you want to be. Here’s Health.com’s exclusive interview with Joseph Luciani, Ph.D., author of The Power of Self-Coaching: The Five Essential Steps to Creating the Life You Want (John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2004).
Q. Is the “self-coaching” that you describe in your book the same thing as the “life coaching” that this month’s HEALTH discusses?
A. The focus is different. Life coaching deals with externals, success or
failure, negotiating a life that works for you. Self-coaching deals with
the internal world. Life coaching might be focused on how to get a
promotion at work, while self-coaching would be about how to eliminate
worry or depression. They are alike, though, in that both are a response
to the passivity and ineffectiveness of so many therapeutic approaches.
We’ve adopted an action-oriented coaching metaphor. In self-coaching,
you become an active participant in your own liberation, rather than using
the traditional, more passive approach of reflection.
Q. Is your past as important with coaching as it is in traditional therapy?
A. Not at all. Self-coaching doesn’t give a hoot whether your potty
training was too strict or too lenient. If you are a smoker who wants to
quit, it doesn’t matter why you took that first cigarette. What matters
is what you’re going to do to break the habit. Self-coaching is about
breaking the habits that are ruining your life.
Q. How did you develop your method of self-coaching?
A. One of the seeds came for me when I was in Jungian training analysis.
One day, after about five years of therapy, I was sitting there whining
and moaning and groaning, and my analyst just said two words: “Yes,
dear.” After I got over my rage, I realized he was absolutely right. I
was using therapy as nothing more than a springboard to whine and moan
about my life. I was expecting him to rescue me. That was the turning
point. I started to recognize that for me, there had to be a more direct
way of changing my life.
Q. Your self-coaching method is centered on two basic principles: control and habit. How do you see habit and control ruling, and ruining, our lives?
A. This is controversial, because most people feel that anxiety and
depression are more complicated than they are. Once we start treating
anxiety and depression as habit, it puts the power in our hands. I can
deal with habit, but when you tell me I’ve got an illness, that’s an
ominous statement. I think that’s what keeps people mired in therapy.
Once you start understanding that what trips you up are habits that we
either feed or starve, that simple concept is so workable. It’s like
having a pigeon on your deck. If you throw it a few crumbs, the next day
you’ll see a couple of pigeons. You throw a couple more crumbs, and by
the end of the week, you can’t go onto your deck because there are so
many pigeons. The answer is simple: Stop feeding the pigeons. If you feed
the habits of insecurity, worry, procrastination, fear, doubt, and
self-distrust, they will continue to flock around you. You can only
liberate yourself if you figure out how to stop feeding the habits.
Q. What about control? How does that figure into your method?
A. I explain
control this way: We all grow up with some degree of insecurity. In order
to compensate for these insecurities, we develop strategies of control. It
may be worrying, perfectionism, avoidance, lying, or manipulating. These
are all strategies of control, and they began in some earlier period in
our life. We become the end product of these habits.
Q. Can you give some examples of problems or habits that self-coaching is especially effective at handling?
A. Worrying is the best example. I also deal with a host of problems such
as relationship issues, anxiety, and phobias. For many people, dealing
with these problems is like bumping into things in a darkened room.
Self-coaching is a way to turn on the light and realize that what you’re
looking for are the control issues in your life. By breaking these habits
of control, self-coaching helps people regain self-trust, to trust our
instincts, and to live spontaneously and reactively to life, without
insecurity.
Q. You break your self-coaching method down into five steps: charting your weaknesses, separating fact from fiction, stop listening to the noise, letting go, and motivating yourself. Of these five steps, which is the hardest step for most people to achieve?
A. Letting go. That’s the moment on the diving board when you actually
learn to turn away from the doubts, fears, and negatives that congest our
mind. That’s where most people really struggle. There are three
strategies I use in letting go. One I call changing the channel—just
like hitting a button on a radio. Sometimes recognizing that we need to
shift our thoughts from negative to neutral or positive is enough. You
realize there’s no reason you can’t flip a thought into its opposite.
The second strategy is being open to “therapeutic recklessness,” which
gives us a sense of security and trust so that you’re willing to take
that leap of faith and to trust yourself to handle life. It only feels
reckless to be yourself, though it is never reckless. Finally, there’s
the practice of meditation, in which you can train yourself to step out of
thoughts and let them go, instead of being tethered to them.
Q. Do you find that some people just can’t complete this step?
A. Most people will feel that way initially, but that’s where the
self-coaching comes in. If you feel you can’t, you won’t. But once you
realize there’s nothing in your way, and there never was, there’s
nothing stopping you from letting go.
– Nancy Matsumoto is a freelance writer for Health.
January 2005
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This
article on stress & others can be found at
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