Weekly 2

A beautiful life includes joy and pain.

It includes happiness, struggle, pleasure, and frustration. That balance is not evidence that something has gone wrong.

But we can layer unnecessary suffering on top of it.

We judge ourselves, decide we are incapable, and make pain mean something terrible about who we are. That additional suffering can keep us from growing, achieving, and enjoying our relationships.

My goal in coaching is to help you reduce that unnecessary suffering. The Self-Coaching Model gives us a way to see how we create it and how we can change it.

Understand the motivational triad

I teach the motivational triad as the brain seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, and conserving energy.

Those tendencies can be useful for survival. But following them automatically can keep you from the life you want.

Your brain may look for danger and reasons to feel bad. You might interpret that activity as proof that something is wrong with you.

Understanding the pattern gives you another way to look at it.

Instead of always avoiding discomfort, you can deliberately choose discomfort that helps you pursue a goal. Instead of taking every false pleasure offered to you, you can enjoy pleasures that support your life.

And instead of conserving every bit of energy, you can exert it on purpose toward something that matters.

The five parts of the Model

The Self-Coaching Model organizes our experience into five categories: circumstances, thoughts, feelings, actions, and results.

Circumstances are the things outside your direct control: other people, the weather, and events in the world.

Thoughts are what you think about those circumstances.

Feelings are the vibrations you experience in your body. Your thoughts create them.

Actions are the behaviors driven by those feelings.

Results are what those actions create.

When you understand how these categories work together, you can examine what is happening in your life instead of treating your experience as something you have no influence over.

A thought can look like reality

If you have never questioned your thinking, you may believe your thoughts are simply observations of how the world is.

Consider the thought that you are not good at something.

You may have plenty of evidence. You have never been good at it. You have tried before. You believe it is just a fact.

But look at what happens in the Model.

Thinking you are not good at it creates a feeling of being incapable. When you feel incapable, you may not try or practice.

Then you do not improve, and that result supports the original thought.

The first step is becoming conscious of the thought. Then you can decide whether you want to keep it and its effects.

Become curious about your own thinking

A thought download helps you see what is running in your mind.

You begin noticing ideas you learned earlier in life and beliefs you have repeated so often they feel unquestionable.

Coaching offers another perspective.

Your familiar thoughts may be new to a coach, making them easier for the coach to identify.

This is useful even when you have practiced for years. I still benefit from someone helping me see thoughts I have not noticed.

As circumstances and results change, new thinking comes up. The work continues.

Once you see a thought and its effect, you can make a deliberate choice. You can keep it or begin practicing something different.

Clean pain and dirty pain

When I began coaching, I learned the distinction between clean pain and dirty pain.

Clean pain is the pain that is part of life. Sometimes we want to feel negatively about something painful.

Dirty pain is the unnecessary suffering we add.

Thinking you are ugly, incapable, or fundamentally wrong and constantly berating yourself creates pain that does not need to be there.

Coaching is not about making every experience positive. Life remains a balance of positive and negative.

It is about recognizing where your mind is adding suffering and learning another way to relate to yourself.

Why big dreams bring up discomfort

What you want and believe is possible is influenced by what you have been exposed to.

One of my goals as a coach is to introduce bigger ideas and possibilities so you can consider them.

But a big dream can immediately bring up pain.

Your brain anticipates work, failure, discomfort, and losing familiar pleasures. It suggests keeping the goal small and staying where you are.

That response does not have to decide your future.

You can examine the thoughts, feel the emotions, and choose actions that develop your capacity rather than return automatically to what is familiar.

Use a goal to practice the Model

Early in my work, people asked why I did not use the Model to make a million dollars if I believed thoughts could lead to results.

I decided to try.

I put that goal in the result line and worked on the thoughts and feelings that supported powerful action. I created the result and surprised myself.

Then I chose ten million dollars.

I did not believe that goal at first. But the commitment required me to change my thinking, feeling, and behavior.

After that, I chose a hundred-million-dollar goal to call me toward more growth and creativity.

In the episode, I described the year the business had fifty million dollars in revenue and I received a two-hundred-million-dollar offer.

The most important part of that story was not the money. It was what changed in my identity, capacity, and understanding of what was possible.

Notice the strategic byproducts

Pursuing those goals taught me to manage my mind, process emotions, embrace growth's discomfort, and overcome the desire to hide.

Those skills also affected my relationship with myself and my family.

I became more courageous and more able to accept challenges.

That is what I want to share through coaching. You can work toward a measurable result while also becoming someone who has more capacity to live the life you choose.

The process requires more than hearing about the Model once.

Learn it. See it used. Practice new thinking, feeling, and action repeatedly. Return to the work when old patterns reappear.

That regular practice is why I designed the weekly touchpoint described in this series. You can learn to recognize unnecessary suffering, make conscious choices, and create a different experience of your life.