Your feelings are lying to you… or why to have a coach

Your feelings are lying to you

Your fear says: don’t do anything… Or it may say: run… and you run.

When you look at all the people you know, the ones that listen to their feelings are mediocre at best, No winners among them.

Because winning requires you to stay in the game, regardless of your feelings.

I say: you are stupid, a lot. What do I mean? Hey, stupid as the stupid does.

Do you know how many opportunities Bill Gates had to say: Nah, too hard! or Nah, they don’t want it. or Nah, I am too afraid.

It is easy to see with 20/20 hindsight.

It is not so easy to see when you are at the beginning of your path. An you encounter your first opportunity to say Nah… Maybe your wife doesn’t agree. Maybe it’s Christmas. Maybe work is piling up in the office at the job that pays your rent… while you are trying to build a business of your own.

Maybe you have this great project in mind that can make you a zillionaire, but this person is bugging you, or you are in love with that person, so it’s never the right time.

Or you find yourself having to read three books that I asked you to read, and then I mention a TV show… and now you are really mired… and lost. Too much…

Or you came to one of my webinars, and I activated a capacity for you… but by the time you got off, you had to make dinner, and talk to your family, and you don’t even remember what capacity it was… and then you have to listen to the replay… and by the time you do it, the inspiration is gone.

These are actually real examples of people choosing to NOT be flying with a safety net, but do it alone.

Unless your core calls the shot, not your thoughts, not your feelings, not other people in your environment, but your own core, you probably won’t ever get any decent size project done.

Of course, some of you respond well to “have to”, especially those of you who completed your higher education successfully. You may procrastinate, but eventually get it done.

But left to your own devices, you FEEL no pressure, so you flounder.

And between you and me, it is normal.

If I didn’t have YOU on the other end, that I promised to take you to the Promised Land, I would probably flounder a lot.

I set up my life to have a crowd of people to expect me to pick up my cross and go.

I need that because my base nature is prone to depression. I don’t know if it is possible, but it seems that way.

When I look at the members of my family, my mother was floundering, my older brother was floundering when he had a stint of having his own business, but excelled when he had a company counting on him. And my brother floundered, he is a flounderer.

My father on the other hand had that secret ingredient that didn’t allow him to drop the ball. And he didn’t… until he married a woman who valued family life more than accomplishment.

Luckily my father was already in retirement age… But I think that the fire was still burning, and without accomplishment it burned him.

Now, let’s look at you: do you perform, over time, well on your own? Are you holding the vision and the steps and the strength and focus to go back to them, while you keep your big picture vision, without getting tunnel vision?

Probably not. But you feel that you can. You feel that you are not lesser than the next person… but… but you don’t know how they got where they got to?

You don’t know what it took. You don’t know what stumbling blocks they got through.

Here is a brief history of mine, through this lens.

I was a high achiever from age 16, where an outside pressure coupled with an inside pressure changed me.

But when you look at my summers… I was wild, and lost.

If and when I had an influence, a love, a circle of friends to take me off my path: they took me off as surely as night follows day.

And as an adult, the moment I had a boy friend I turned into pumpkin… I suffered, that is how I know my father burned and hurt, but didn’t do anything.

The two people, as my mother said, were as different as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One is an achiever, the other is a loser.

You may be able to have both, I could not.

The other thing, when I look closely, I always needed someone who needed what I was creating. That was my North Star.

This is why I learned all those skills while I volunteered for other people to do the work for them. Because I had too many half-started, half-finished projects for me to know that I need the “north star” to stay the course.

For many people having a coach is the solution. Not the Life Coach type… those have no skills that will be useful to keep you on track.

Business coaches, if you are in the business, are the type of person as they are… they are good too. I wasn’t lucky to find any business coach who was able and willing to both keep me on track and help me grow my business.

I once paid a lot of money to a coach who helped me to define the North Star. You may know that positive definition is worthless… you can only define, precisely, a thing or a place, by defining what it is not, although it is seemingly that.

I frustrated that coach, because that is the only thing, really, I was interested in. What he didn’t know is that working on what my North Star isn’t, I managed to stay the course for 11 years… quite a feat for a cash strapped business run by someone who had no capacity called “process” and therefore the work done by employees was nearly always wasted, or worthless. ¹

I could have hired a coach at that time, who would have forced me to create processes, like the E-myth guy, but I didn’t… Why? I was stupid, I guess… I knew I didn’t have it all, but as a “Forget Thyself” person, I wanted to do it alone.

In the end that company died, under my direction.

I am still dealing with the same lack: having a capacity, namely here Process, didn’t teach me how to use it… it just gave me the ability to learn it and then do it well. But learn it how?

OK, why am I saying all this? Because this week I heard more “No, thank you” answers to my invitation to the coaching program Reclaim, than on any other week. And from people, who, with guidance, could become winners.

It hurts. But it hurts them more. Just like me, not looking for a process coach… it hurts me.

I’d rather succeed with someone’s help than fail all on my own.

Wow, I said it.

Because that is what is at stake: failing all on your own, or maybe succeeding with someone’s help.
That was, by the way, one of the things you probably skipped, when you read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell… that NOBODY succeeds alone.

1. As you will see later in this article, I now have the capacity, but I am still not using it… :-(

Author: Sophie Benshitta Maven

True empath, award winning architect, magazine publisher, transformational and spiritual coach and teacher, self declared Avatar View all posts by Sophie Benshitta Maven