We are all a 'work in progress'

Creating the best version of ourselves is the goal of coaching. Making continual improvements, so that we become better people, better parents, better entrepreneurs, better leaders and better partners.

In my coaching our focus is on utilising the incredible gift that is the human brain. Each human brain consists of around 86 billion cells, which, when they fire together, create memories, thoughts, and potential moments of insight, learning and creativity, maybe even genius.

Unfortunately, our brains can also detract from our best performance with negativity, limiting beliefs and ineffective habits.

Utilising the latest breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology and coaching in easy to understand bite-sized learning, we apply step-by-step improvements that you can apply to all areas of your life. 

Neuroscientists advise us that approx. 95% of all brain activity is unconscious. The challenge for all of us is to use the 5% of conscious brain activity as wisely as we can to produce the best possible results. But sometimes it’s not that easy to do.

For a moment, imagine that you have been gifted the very latest highest specification mobile phone. It has all the capacity, but it doesn’t come with any apps. However, the good news is that it does come with a huge budget to hire software developers to write your apps. You have a choice of just two possible suppliers. The first is a high-performing software team at Apple, and the second is a toddler. Who do you choose?

Most people choose the Apple team of course, as how can you expect a toddler to programme something as sophisticated as a mobile phone?

And yet, a toddler programmed much of your mind, and everyone else’s mind too! Psychologists tell us that much of our foundational thinking happens before we are five years old. And our brains use their own knowledge and experience to verify any new information. If a child experiences their mother as a constant figure in their life, and a rotation of men, they will understand that as ‘true’. They may well spend much, if not all, of their lives with that understanding and will make decisions and behave in a way that recognises and reinforces that ‘truth’.

That’s because the brain doesn’t remember the exact circumstances of a memory. It remembers some details and the meaning. The child in the above example may ‘know’ that ‘Men don’t stay in long-term relationships’ or ‘Men are unreliable’ or any other ‘meaning’ from their experience.

It tends to take more than one contradictory experience to change our minds about what we believe. We even have a well known saying that keeps us from changing our minds. ‘That’s the exception that proves the rule’. What a great way to undermine an experience and keep our old beliefs, even if those beliefs don’t serve us or make us happy!

We tend to unconsciously hold onto beliefs that we have had for a long time, even though we had a far more limited view of life when we came to the conclusions that led us to those beliefs.

Coaching supports the process of reprogramming your adult mind consciously for you to be more effective, capable and happy. It’s a job that’s never complete, and yet can give us huge satisfaction as we are always a work in progress.