Self-Coaching Tip: Change Your Environment

When I was little, my mother used to tell me, “don’t slouch.” I can still hear her voice in my head. Little did I know, that admonition would serve me well when I began learning how to coach myself.

Think about it. Every moment of every day, your body is interacting with environmental forces, such as lighting, seating and gravity. If the environment is in harmony with your body’s needs, you maintain good posture. On the other hand, poor lighting or sitting at a desk that is too big or too small, causes you to adapt your posture to the poor environment.

Change in posture is the body’s way of communicating that there is a change in your energy. The longer you maintain incorrect posture, the more constricted your body becomes. As the tension grows, your breathing is restricted, reducing the amount of oxygen getting into your system. You become more myopic—seeing less, hearing less, understanding less, and fearing more.

That’s right. Your posture actually affects your emotional state. Think about it. Fear constricts your breathing, making it shallower and faster. Fear constricts your body, tenses your muscles, making it more difficult to move. And, once fear sets in, your brain seems to shut down, reducing the number of choices available to you.

Your posture reflects how your environment is affecting your body. When you change your posture to adapt to a poor environment – walk more slowly, slump in your chair, lay your head on your arm, sit closer to your work, tilt your head – it’s your body’s way of telling you that your energy is decreasing. Your body is trying to coach you.

This week, spend some time playing with your environment and notice it’s impact on your body. Here are some suggestions to help you get started:

Change the lighting. If the room is very brightly lit, turn off some of the lights and see if your body relaxes a bit. If the room is dark, turn on some more lights.

Change the height of your chair when working at your desk. To get the correct height, place your elbow on your desk and put your hand on your face. Your fingertips should just reach your eyes.

Change the placement of your computer screen. The top of the screen should be even with your eyes so you are looking down at a 20 degree angle. This allows you to read your screen at the optimal position for your neck and back.

Change the sounds in your room. If there are a lot of sounds, reduce some of them. If it’s quiet, try adding some sound. Notice what kinds of sounds relax you and what sounds tense your body.

Move your whole body. Every hour, take a 1-2 minute movement break. This allows your body to take in more oxygen and realign your body for greater energetic efficiency.

To learn more about how your body impacts your self-coaching abilities, try our 4-month Spiritual Cross-Training program, risk-free for 30 days.

Self-Coaching Tip: Expect the Unexpected

A few years ago, I set an Intention for peace and harmony in my relationship with my ex-husband. Within three days, the energy of the amplified intentions was having an impact on my life—but it didn't look anything like peace and harmony. Almost overnight, the situation with my ex-husband threatened to become litigious. I felt overwhelmed and threatened at a core survival level.

I knew what usually worked to coach myself through this situation, but I was having some difficulty. I became angry with my ex-, blaming him for the situation. For days, I held my anger as a protective shield against the primal fears that were surfacing. The anger interfered with my abilities to function effectively as a parent, a coach, a CEO. Finally, after several days of missing deadlines and appointments, I called a fellow Coach and asked for help. After doing the body movements that help me move out of my fears, I spent some time working through one of my favorite tools that helps me get out of my head enough to partner with the fear I was feeling. Then, my colleague led me through a visualization in which I saw all of my issues with my ex-husband as rocks, stones and pebbles loaded into a backpack. Below is the visualization and how it worked for me:
She directs me to a small footbridge spanning a river of healing, loving waters. I stop halfway across the bridge and open the backpack. I pull out the first rock. It is an old friend—abandonment. I hold it, touching the rough surface, feeling the emptiness of the emotion in my body. When I am ready, I toss it into the river and watch, transfixed by the changing colors as the rock is transformed by the loving energy.

I continue emptying the backpack, revisiting old, familiar issues I've been working on for years: self-worth, loneliness, betrayal. At the bottom of the pack is an unfamiliar issue. A small pebble, the size of a marble, dense and heavy. I hold it in my hands, waiting for guidance.

Sobs burst forth. It is guilt. A very old guilt. Time swirls around me, the past and future blending into the present. I am two years old, maybe three. My father is ill. He is changed. He is in pain. The guilt is born in that moment: guilt that I cannot alleviate his pain. I cannot make him laugh.

Every moment of my life takes on a new meaning. The buried guilt motivating my every action: if I don't fix the pain, I am not worthy.
me:
She directs me to a small footbridge spanning a river of healing, loving waters. I stop halfway across the bridge and open the backpack. I pull out the first rock. It is an old friend—abandonment. I hold it, touching the rough surface, feeling the emptiness of the emotion in my body. When I am ready, I toss it into the river and watch, transfixed by the changing colors as the rock is transformed by the loving energy.

I continue emptying the backpack, revisiting old, familiar issues I've been working on for years: self-worth, loneliness, betrayal. At the bottom of the pack is an unfamiliar issue. A small pebble, the size of a marble, dense and heavy. I hold it in my hands, waiting for guidance.

Sobs burst forth. It is guilt. A very old guilt. Time swirls around me, the past and future blending into the present. I am two years old, maybe three. My father is ill. He is changed. He is in pain. The guilt is born in that moment: guilt that I cannot alleviate his pain. I cannot make him laugh.

Every moment of my life takes on a new meaning. The buried guilt motivating my every action: if I don't fix the pain, I am not worthy.
That was my story. That was what I'd been telling myself since the birth of that guilt. Now that the story was out, I began to change it, re-script it, find new evidence of my worthiness. The evidence was already there. I just hadn’t let it in yet because it didn't fit my story. Every compliment, thank you, or gift I'd received over the years had been deflected, pushed away, because that little girl knew she wasn't any good. Now, I could re-visit those moments of acceptance in a new light, and begin to let the love and acceptance into my heart.

Is this how I expected peace and harmony to manifest in my life? Not at all. At some level, I was expecting my ex-husband's behavior to change, too. But, this inner peace and harmony is much more than I ever expected. I love myself in a new way now that I have found a new level of self-acceptance. And it affects my interactions with everyone else in my life. I judge myself and others less harshly. I love others in a new way. While you may find the unexpected as you develop your self-coaching skills, keep in mind, that the unexpected will be even better than you could imagine.

Self-Coaching Tip: Move Your Body, Change Your Thoughts

For a large part of my life, my Inner Critic often stopped me from learning or doing something new by saying, "I'm not smart enough to learn this." And then, it reminded me of all the subjects in school that I struggled with like math and science. I literally re-lived the pain and embarrassment and confusion of various math and science classes throughout my school years each time I tried to learn something new.

Here was a belief about myself that was not supporting me.

I was convinced that my brain was just ‘too slow’ to understand new ideas. But, my story about ‘being slow’ was only a part of the picture. When I applied self-coaching to look at the whole picture, I discovered a few surprises. Remember, self-coaching includes looking at your body, emotion and thought patterns. Here’s what the whole picture looked like:

• Story/ Thoughts: I’m too slow to learn new ideas.
• Emotions: pain, embarrassment & confusion
• Body: quick, jerky and clumsy movements

For me, being stupid meant being slow. My body movements, however, were anything but slow. My breathing was fast and shallow. My movements (walking, talking, picking things up) were too fast and uncoordinated.

Somewhere along the line, my body, in a constant state of stress, had forgotten the pattern of slowing down. So, I used contrasting movement to learn how to re-gain control of my body. I began by speeding up my breathing and movements and then contrasted that with slower breathing and movements. When I noticed I was racing across the room, I slowed my walking to a crawl before resuming a more normal pace. When I became aware that I was talking very fast, I took a breath and forced myself to speak more slowly. When I recognized that I was racing through housework, I stopped and did it in slow motion for a moment. When I resumed the housework, my movements were more coordinated and graceful.

It only took a few days before I began noticing the difference in my thoughts and reactions to situations. First, my Inner Critic quieted down enough so I could remember that some subjects in school were very easy for me. English, French, and History classes were so much fun for me that they didn’t seem like work. When I came into contact with other people, my thoughts were calmer and I could access many different options in a situation. My responses became more appropriate for the situations and people were being kind, rather than attacking me.

By changing my body movements, I easily and permanently changed my belief about myself. I no longer think of myself as stupid. The thoughts you think about your self are just patterns. They are held in place by emotional and body patterns. And the body pattern is the most predominant pattern. By changing your body’s pattern, by moving it differently, you can change very deep-seated beliefs that no longer serve you.

So, as you begin to coach yourself, don’t use sheer willpower. Move your body and change your thoughts. To find out more about the most effective movements to add to your self-coaching, join our 4-month Spiritual Cross-Training program, risk-free.