Paula arrived at the coaching with an agenda of change – coming out of a long marriage, leaving a corporate job to start her own business and having her home renovated.
It would have been easy to focus on these external situational changes. In coaching we coach the individual and not the circumstances. As a result, our initial work was around her internal perspective. We started with fulfilment coaching – what would fulfilment feel like for her? What would fulfilment look like? What would her goal be for herself during these changing times?
She identified how she wanted to feel, what she wanted to be doing, how she wanted to react to things that arose, and about her general mindset and attitude. In subsequent sessions we worked on her confidence given all the changes to ground her.
She started practicing self gratitudes – a daily practice of reflecting on her good qualities and skills. Like a muscle, confidence can be strengthened by repetitive focus on it.
Today’s session after a few months was transformative. In the process of focusing on who she wanted to be she:
- Gave up alcohol as it made her feel worse physically and didn’t support her vision of herself
- Lost 2 stone/28lbs/14 kilos
- Surrounded herself with people supporting her in the way she wanted
- Took a course on becoming a non-executive board member
Interestingly, she devised a clever structure to help her lose the weight – she bought a suitcase/piece of luggage that suited her new 1960’s style décor and for each pound she lost she placed a weight in the suitcase. She artfully positioned the suitcase near her dining table to be a visual reminder of her progress and keep her on track. When she felt like having a piece of cake she picked up the suitcase which turned her off the junk food.
What luggage are you dragging around that doesn’t serve you anymore?
