Coaching Yourself: You Can Do It!

Exploring Your Deepest Thoughts

Once you begin to practice actively listening to yourself, you will certainly achieve a deeper awareness of what your own deepest thoughts, feelings, fears, dreams, and challenges are — and can then begin to explore them in more detail. At first, brainstorming is all you need to do, as long as you commit to truly being honest with yourself (harder than you may think!).

Ask yourself deep and critical questions. Depending on what area of life you discover really needs improvement, they may include such questions as:

• Can I see myself living with my partner for the rest of my life — happily?
• What is holding me back?
• Why am I not advancing in my career?
• What are my real reasons for eating too much?
• How can I manage my finances more smartly?
• Am I really doing right by my family by working this much?

Sitting with the tough questions of life and writing down the answers as they come to you, free-style, can be enormously cathartic and lay the foundations for the next stage — beginning to change things.

Goal Setting

Continuing on the same path, with the same approach, is extremely likely to either maintain the status quo or witness yourself tumbling slowly down the hill. You're feeling stuck. You don't want to feel stuck. You want to feel fulfilled, and happy, and motivated, and useful. You may want a career change, or to finally reach a health weight, or to learn to draw, to learn strategies to prevent toxic relationships, or to find out what it would take for you to not feel this stressed or depressed all the time any more.

After listening to your deepest thoughts and ramblings, after witnessing your increased self-awareness, and after encouraging you on your quest to ask and answer yourself some very tough questions, a life coach would help you set specific, measurable goals that you can work on.

You may decide to explore going back to college, to have a true heart-to-heart chat with your partner about where your relationship is going, to commit to eating low-fat home-cooked meals three times a week, to join a gym and attend it twice a week, or to only ever drink during the weekend, to name a few. These things can help you progress towards over-arching goals of upward mobility, starting a family, losing weight, getting fit, and living a healthy lifestyle.

READ Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Exercises You Can Do At Home Without A Therapist

Accountability And Progress-Tracking

Plenty of people are really quite good at concocting pipe dreams and then forgetting all about them as they sink back into their old rut, every single year. It's called making New Year's resolutions. One of the greatest advantages of getting a life coach is that they keep you accountable and help you track your progress, in addition to helping you uncover your goals. If you want to self-coach, accountability and progress-tracking as just as important.

Therefore:

• Do not just make vague goals, but set a date by which you want to achieve them.
• Give yourself friendly pep-talks in the form of journaling. If that feels creepy, perhaps join an online forum where you can talk about your goals anonymously yet still gain a sense of accountability, or confide in a friend.
• However, realize that the tough voice that places you back on your chosen path when you stray needs to be you, yourself. Motivation needs to be internal.
• Review and update your goals regularly.

While being your own life coach can't possibly offer the same experience as having someone else coach you, you can absolutely achieve an awful lot by committing to these principles.