As I looked into her sad eyes, they swelled with tears long since held back. One teardrop trickled down her cheek and I could feel my eyes glazing over, as I too felt her pain.
After a long silence she asked, ‘Who am I?’
As a life coach, I spend a lot of my time working with other people’s emotional state and its impact on their attitude to life and the effect this has on their self esteem, self confidence, their relationships, family and so on.
Last week I met with a new client who has taken me on as her personal coach to help her get her ‘work life balance’ into better balance.
Who am I? What am I doing with my life?
As you may expect, the first thing I do with a new client is ask them a lot of questions about themselves. It is a very rare individual who doesn’t try to describe themselves by their role at home or their job description. I am an Executive Assistant, I am a Landscape Gardener, or worst case; ‘I’m just a housewife!’
The lady I met last week had become anaesthetised to many of her emotions by long periods of physical and emotional abuse in her early childhood; to the point where today, as a middle age woman, she simply goes through her day to day routine with no purpose other than to get up tomorrow and do it all again.
Hers is a particularly sad story, but it isn’t unique. It is a story I’ve heard many times before ‘? and that is the tragedy of it. So many people let life happen to them, rather than to take control of their life.
What this client has in her favour is that she has high self-awareness. She knows what she is doing to herself; she simply has no idea how to change her life. She feels trapped, because she is trapped ‘? trapped by her own mindset.
It was her high self-awareness that finally pushed her to ask me for help, and it is this same self-awareness she possesses that will ensure that my coaching with her will be successful. I can only be successful as a life coach when I have clients who know they want to change.
It is a tragedy that so many people like this client, are plodding through their daily routines without the combination of self-awareness to realise they need help and the assertiveness to ask for it.
If this is sounds like your story, don’t wait a moment longer. Please get in touch.
Hope you have a great day.