Like so many, my healing practice was irreparably damaged by Covid. With that, my connection to purpose, stability, structure, and my favorite people was cut off. Over time, I began to feel this in my body via symptoms of varying kinds, coming and going. Recently, I began to notice that my body was finally getting on board with all my efforts to recover from the joyride, and I have notes.
Times of stress typically show themselves to be opportunities to reassess what is working for us – in our diets, relationships, activity level, how we talk to ourselves, and all other areas. Probably more impactful than Covid was my decision to revisit my concept of healthy boundaries in order to protect my energy, to allow for recovery and growth. This resulted in losing people, and I hadn’t seen that coming. Even though it was crushing to lose people close to me, I had a strong feeling this was the right thing.
When you are not taught to advocate for yourself, it can take a long time to square with your actions. You may question yourself, walking yourself through it multiple times a day for weeks, months, or years. You may ask yourself what you could have done to have possibly avoided a negative outcome, smoothed things over, appeased. This may also be reinforced by those around you, as our society generally gravitates toward the status quo. If you don’t deal with it, this rumination could turn to bitterness, and that bitterness can become personality. But we ᐞ･ﾟ✦alwaysᐞ･ﾟ✦ deal with our problems head-on, don’t we? And so we turn to books, lectures, courses, self care, and affirming memes until we begin to really feel in our body that we did the right thing.
You could certainly slog on this way for years, slowly working it out for yourself, or you could hire an advocate to model these behaviors and assist with experiential learning until they become second nature for you.
That’s right – coaching isn’t just about enhancing work performance, getting that business off the ground and in the sky, learning to date, and budgeting better. These are just symptoms of an inner conflict, one which can be addressed simply by forming new habits. In this time of communal healing from shared experiences, a qualified coach can help you navigate negative self talk or patterns of accepting less than you’re worth from an increasingly stressed out circle of friends and family.
There’s a big difference between coaching and therapy, though many therapists are now incorporating coaching into their repertoire. In a coaching session, we may still use the past as a light framework for our self-study and find benefit in validation and empathy, but we are focused on the now and how we can make decisions to create a reality that reflects our highest potential in all aspects of being.
In my own coaching process, I began to recognize my patterns of self-limitation, learned to move past it and to recognize it in real time. In my meditation, yoga, and healing efforts, this has been the missing piece of the puzzle. The progress I made in moving forward allowed me to recognize what was holding me back and clear the way for all my other work to be more effective. I became my own coach!
I wish coaching had been available to me when I began my journey, swaying here and there with different moods, stressors, and teachings. In a time and place when it can be quite difficult to find a consistent body of wisdom which speaks to one’s higher knowing, learning from those who have been there in real time with real advice is invaluable.
Heather Ralston 