How coaching can change your relationship with yourself

It’s essentially human to find life challenging and to lose our way. Coaching gives space to reflect and creates a supportive relationship where someone works alongside you, without judgement. We can’t always make it alone. Sometimes we don't know what the issues are and can’t see past our own perspective. Sometimes we know what the issues are and don't know what to do about them.

The stories we tell ourselves

Coaching is essentially an exploration of the self. It can help us look at who we are, how we see ourselves and how we show up in the world. It’s about examining the stories we tell ourselves about who we think we are and how we frame and filter our experience as a result.

Sometimes these stories become so familiar that we stop questioning them. We might tell ourselves, “I’m terrible at making decisions”, “I always get this wrong” or “Other people handle this better than me”. Over time, these thoughts can start to feel like facts rather than interpretations.

Coaching can create an interruption to these automatic patterns. It gives you an opportunity to slow things down, look at them from a different perspective and consider what might be useful to keep, question or change.

How your relationship with yourself can affect you

A difficult or overly critical relationship with ourselves can sometimes contribute to feeling stuck, lost, overwhelmed or unsure of what we want. We may lose trust in ourselves to make decisions, take action or cope with change, and this can affect how confidently we move through the world.

Through the coaching process, clients often become aware of the person they think they should be, or how much they measure themselves against what other people may think or expect of them.

They may also notice beliefs, expectations or strategies they have picked up through past experiences and consider whether those ways of thinking are still useful to them today.

How coaching can offer a different perspective

Coaches use feedback and share observations to help clients notice patterns that can be difficult to recognise when we are caught up in our own experience.

One of the most useful insights can come from hearing our own language reflected back to us. A coach might notice how often someone makes broad judgements about themselves, assumes the worst or turns a mistake into a statement about who they are as a person.

Do you need to change yourself?

Clients often come to coaching wanting clarity, direction or motivation. They may expect they need to change who they are or completely change their external life.

Sometimes, however, the most useful change is in the relationship they have with themselves. Rather than asking, “What’s wrong with me?”, coaching can create space to ask different questions: “What am I assuming about myself?”, “What matters to me?” or “What would it look like to treat myself with more understanding?”

This doesn’t mean ignoring things we genuinely want to change or improve. It means recognising that growth doesn’t have to begin from the belief that who we are now is somehow not good enough.

We have an inherent sense of self-value and self-worth. Self-confidence and self-esteem comes quietly from this place, not from what we do or the feedback from others. Working with a coach can give you space to explore how you see yourself, question assumptions that may be holding you back and consider how you would like your relationship with yourself to develop.