Coaching Yourself: Basic Principles of Life Coaching

You can actually benefit from the principles of life coaching at any time, not just by being in a formal session with a coach.  By being mindful of the basic principles involved you are actually coaching yourself whenever you consciously and intentionally talk to yourself in a positive way, or focus on something you want to achieve.

So isn’t that a wonderful opportunity to be developing and improving yourself and your mind all the time?  Isn’t it the best way to weed negative thoughts out of your mind all the time – whenever they show themselves to you?

Self-coaching is something I do all the time.  I am always thinking about the content of my mind, listening to my body, and learning from the environment around me – and my reaction, or response, to it.

And so this is a tremendous boon to driving oneself forward, upwards, and also inwards, to make sure the goals being pursued and achieved are serving the heart’s real desires, for as they say in the industry, “Success without fulfillment is nothing.”

The first principle of basic coaching is to Be Proactive, as everything else follows on from a desire to actually change things, and the realization that one can actually make a difference in one’s life by Being Proactive.

Relationship Wisdom

So we have our wisdom. How do we apply to that to relationships to get our Relationship Wisdom?

Well, because we have no ego involved, we have two people who are free to let and allow the connection between them be whatever it may be and is.

We also have two people who have a sense of self that is secure; they have inner security from knowing who they are, therefore there is no need for the neediness which is often found in relationships. Thus we do not have what my friend and colleague, John Christian, calls; ‘Two Egos Bashing into Each Other’.

“The purpose of a relationship is to nurture the other person.” – Deepak Chopra

This absence of Ego allows for the freedom to be oneself – and the confidence to allow the other person to be themselves – because we don’t fear the consequences for our sense of self of whatever “them being themselves” may be, or mean.

Without this, we would be – and are – unable to want for them what they want for themselves, to the extent that we want something for them, we want them to be something.  So when this is the case, when we actually want them to be what we want them to be, rather than what they want them to be, we unwittingly make ourselves their enemy.

“Want for the other person what they want for themselves.” – Lester Levenson

In addition to this taming of the Ego for Relationship Wisdom, it may also be helpful if we deal with our Shadow, or any Shadow aspects we may have, or areas where we are not being true to ourselves, as this allows us to actually know what it is we actually want in any aspect of a relationship…

An effective relationship has an inter-subjective truth; a justness, a fairness, a harmony - an authentic integration.  But the two or more elements that combine to make up that relationship are each individuals, each with their own individual subjective truth or interior world or landscape, and so it helps if each of those individuals interprets their own inner truth accurately, before (or whilst) attempting to share it with another.