Roughly once a year I teach a class on self-coaching. Whatever that phrase calls to mind for people, though, they rarely anticipate how literally I mean it. This is not about getting better at telling yourself what to do, or cheerleading, or maintaining any particular mindset. Coaching is a conversation, and self-coaching is a conversation with yourself. So how does that work?

On-Demand Connection With An Ideal Listener

Think of someone you feel comfortable opening up to. Someone you can be real with, and you know that they will listen to you in a way that feels good.

What are the qualities of that person, or of their listening, that inspire you to trust them this way?

When I ask this question in class, I get answers like, “They accept me,” “They have a positive mindset,” “They’re listening actively, and asking open-ended questions, but it doesn’t feel like they’re interrogating me,” and “They see my point of view.” People name qualities like warmth, nonjudgment, enthusiasm, vibrancy, compassion, empathy, curiosity, humility, and presence.

It feels good to be listened to in this way, doesn’t it? When they are listened to that way, my students say they feel safe, seen, connected, free, alive, flowing, open, welcome… Not bad!

It feels good to listen that way, too. If you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing you’ve had the privilege to be that listener for someone else sometimes, and you’ve noticed what a gift that is, and the good feelings that go along with that gift. Maybe, like the many people I’ve asked, you felt generous, powerful, purposeful, at ease, connected, heartened, and inspired.

The promise of self-coaching is that you can be that listener for yourself. You can be that great friend, giving yourself all those great feelings. After reading this post, I hope you’ll give it a shot, constructing the voice of an inner coach who is just here to love you and be with you in service to your excellent becoming. I hope the “two” of you have some great conversations. 

Asynchronous Listening

This practice emerged out of experimentation with Internal Family Systems, Active Imagination, Growth Edge Coaching, and my relationship with my dear friend Amy. Amy is a brilliant facilitator who teaches listening and communication skills, among other things, and we got in the habit some years ago of sending one another long voice messages, sharing the joys and challenges in our lives. 

Amy is such a kind and generous listener, I could readily imagine her compassion and empathy for me as I talked things out, even without her listening in real-time. Knowing the good will she would feel toward me in whatever struggle I was facing, I would naturally find more good will toward myself. Amy’s asynchronous attention gave me a little more space to feel all the different feelings, welcome all the different thoughts, and invite them into new harmony together. I would guess what questions she would ask or insights she would share, and sometimes my guesses were right, and often my guesses helped me settle into new ways of being.

Being heard, deeply and fully, invites us to live as the best of ourselves. And it turns out that even imagining being heard can have the same effect.

Later, Amy would listen to the message and respond with her actual reactions, her own authentic advice or curiosity. Sometimes she laughed at how well I’d anticipated her responses, and sometimes she laughed at how poorly. Either way, she was happy to inspire that self-compassion in me, and I would do the same for her. Amy was the one who named what I was really doing, telling me how she enjoyed listening to me coach myself.

When I started teaching more formal self-coaching, I asked myself what it is about Amy that makes her so easy to talk to, even in absentia. I came up with five qualities, abbreviated with the acronym SPACE.

Holding SPACE

Moment by moment, as you practice, your inner coach can offer you:

·   Support: I believe in you

·   Presence: I’m with you in this moment without judgment or agenda

·   Appreciation: I see what’s great about you here and now

·   Curiosity: I want to understand you better

·   Empathy: I see that and feel that with you

Hopefully this list covers the range of intentions your inner coach might hold for you and helps you find the words with which those intentions can be expressed. My invitation is that you write your coach listening and responding with these five attitudes toward you, or “holding SPACE.” Or, put another way, when you are writing as your own inner coach, I invite you to hold SPACE for the wonderful human you’ve sat down to coach. If you do, you’ll soon find that human responding with honesty, vulnerability, and new, powerful insights.

Just like when you hold SPACE for someone else, listening and responding this way invites a feeling of safety and connection. When this happens between two people, we call it co-regulation, one nervous system’s kind attention drawing another into thriving-brain. In a bit of a conceptual somersault, I think of holding SPACE in self-coaching as solo co-regulation. Vividly imagining the support, presence, etc, of your inner coach activates many of the same neural responses as another human being would, easing you out of survival-brain so that new thoughts, new feelings, and new becoming can emerge.

Holding SPACE is the foundational skill of self-coaching, and surprisingly powerful from the very beginning. (The other two core skills in self-coaching are shaping a conversation with yourself to move you toward a goal, and getting unstuck when old fears or old patterns are making that goal inaccessible.) Are you ready to give it a shot?

Exercise:

1. Choose a topic you’d like to coach yourself about. Lean toward something that would be useful to address, but isn’t the biggest, thorniest, headache-inducingest problem in your life right now. We don’t lift the 100lb weights our first day in the gym.
2. Picture your ideal listener. Somebody that you really trust. Somebody that you would feel comfortable telling everything to. Maybe they’re a real person in your life. Maybe it’s a celebrity, or someone who has passed away, or somebody from fiction, or a composite of many people. Maybe it’s your own best self. Who can you talk to without reservations? Picture them vividly.
3. In your journal or writing app, tell this ideal listener the important facts about your dilemma. Share at least a few sentences, and then keep going as long as you like.
4. What might they say back to you? They might express one of the qualities of SPACE (Support, Presence, Appreciation, Curiosity, Empathy) or anything else that is helpful and compassionate.
5. Continue the conversation as if it were the script of a play:

Me: I’m totally overwhelmed with work today. There’s just too much going on, and I’m procrastinating on the important stuff.

Coach: I totally get that. I’ve had those days, too. What’s the thing you’re feeling most overwhelmed by? Maybe we can work out how to get you started with that.

Me: Hmmm. It’s probably the emails I need to write to the Marketing team…

…

…

6. Continue until you feel complete. What was that like for you? Let me know in the comments.

How was that? Let me know in the comments, or email me at yotam@cultivatingleadership.com. 

And if you’d like to learn more about self-coaching, sign up for the intro workshop on July 23^rd!