Overcoming self-sabotage through awakening coaching

Life coaches have the awesome privilege of working with some incredible people on amazing life journeys. The relationship normally starts out by understanding the outcomes that the client seeks. These could be to do with a change of career, or understanding better how to deal with worry and stress. In awakening coaching, we often work on around seven to ten outcomes over an eight-week intensive period.

Coaches will tell you what a delight it is, when the coaching relationship is drawing to a close, to look back and see how clients almost always achieve all the outcomes they originally sought; that the things the client first thought were impossible or difficult are now natural and easy. Often, the client might even have forgotten what the hurdle was in the first instance. This is the art of learning.

Understanding self-sabotage

In this journey of self-discovery and learning, however, there lies a very curious barrier. This is the barrier of self-sabotage and resistance.

At first sight, this is very strange indeed. Why would a writer not want to sit down and write? Why would somebody who desperately wants a change of career not want to take the first steps or develop a plan? Why would somebody who has paid good money to undertake coaching not bother with the practices? Why would somebody who is dieting rush to open the fridge door when they get back from work?

The fragmented mind

The key to anticipating and dissipating this self-sabotage lies in recognising that the psyche is essentially fragmented.

We refer to the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ all day, every day. But we don't know who or what this thing we call ‘I’ really is.

At a superficial level, there isn't just one ‘I’; one ‘me’. We're more like a collection of people chattering around on the top deck of a bus. There's the diligent person who wants to practise and the person who can't be bothered, who wants to lie on the sofa and watch TV. There's the person who has just done 100 sit-ups at the gym, who then goes home and cracks open the Prosecco.

There's constant tension between these conflicting parts of ourselves.

Awakening to greater awareness

At a more fundamental level, we can move beyond all of this and awaken to our true nature, the nature of pure awareness, or ‘pure subjectivity’, using techniques such as meditation, yoga or a practice we use in awakening coaching known as ‘radical awakening’.

When we reach these states of understanding, we discover the infinite dimension of consciousness and, from this place, we can recognise the fragmentation of our own psyche.

This is why ‘awakening’ is so fundamental to everything in awakening coaching.

From this place, we develop the capacity to observe ourselves; we can look back on these conversations in our head. When we do this, we see that our thoughts are completely unreliable. It's a whirlwind of craziness. In fact, it's so crazy that we try to keep it hidden from both ourselves and others.

Creating space for change

But hiding our own fragmentation is unhealthy.

The healthy path, which is key to alignment and sanity, is to observe the rapidly shifting nature of this ‘I’ and its identity.

In awakening coaching, we note down the ‘points of view’ or beliefs that the chatter of our restless mind throws up, the sense of identity and the ‘programming’ of the brain. We can then reboot each of these thoughts using a process known as radical releasing, which takes the emotional charge away from these points of view.

This clearing out of the mind begins to develop a little distance from all of these fragmented selves, and space opens up within us – space in which freedom and infinite possibilities begin to dance.

We stop desperately trying to hold on to these old, tired, used-up identities and, within this space, we can really go about tackling the objectives set at the very beginning.

Therefore, it is the awakening to our true nature, and with that the ability to anticipate and dissipate resistance, which is the key to achieving goals in the coaching relationship.