Coaching - For the Game of Life

by Jackie Zirpdji

The words depression, stress, burnout, chronic fatigue syndrome, or even just blah, are being used in our daily conversations far too excessively. It is time to consider the intelligence of these "diseases" of this century in signaling to us that, indeed, the choices that we are making in the way we engage life are not life-sustaining. And aren't we choosing daily: when to feel discouraged and when to feel motivated; when to speak up and when to silence ourselves; when to leave or when to stay; when to wait or when to move forward.

The profession of coaching has expanded beyond the world of sports and athletics to include the world of business and personal growth. Over the past 5 years, business coaches and life coaches have emerged to address a need that individuals, at home and at work, have: the need to contribute and feel fully alive. The following information and opinions are not necessarily representative of all personal coaches but rather have emerged from my own experience and training as a business and personal coach over the past three years. My intention is that, with this information, you will know that you are not alone, that there are others feeling just like you and that there are resources to support you.

The human nervous system is designed to create habits so that we do not have to learn and re-learn the same things every day. This works wonderfully when it comes to driving a standard but this same process also applies to the way we think, the way we respond in certain situations, the way we respond in certain relationships. These habits of thought sometimes keep us "in the box", unable to choose differently, even though we do not like the results that we are creating.

The benefit of working with a personal coach is that it creates an opportunity to stop, and take the time to become more mindful of choices that we are making, habits of thought that are driving the results in our lives. The question then becomes, do we like what we are creating? Are these habits serving us? What do we want instead?

Signing up for personal coaching is all about getting into a relationship with a person who is trained to ask the right questions, those bigger questions that will make the difference in your life, if you choose to stay with those questions. All too often, the comfort of having the answer, of knowing, pulls us back to the old and familiar. And that is where we get stuck.

Personal coaching is about heightened self-awareness, possibility thinking and creating a mindfulness about how we are engaging life. A personal coach will be able to notice these habits of thought that define the lenses through which you see the world and offer up different perspectives that may, all of a sudden, make the world round rather than flat, opening up all kinds of possibilities. A personal coach knows that all the answers that you are searching for lie within and the brilliance comes not in the answers that are offered up but in the questions that will make you stop, … look within and discover what is possible.

My invitation to you is to take one day this week to be mindful of the choices that you are making that day, as you engage in everyday living. Could you have chosen differently? What could have been different in the results that you created?

Choose mindfully with the knowledge that with every choice, you create.

This article may only be reproduced with permission of the author.

Please contact Jackie Zirpdji at Transformations+ or via e-mail: Jackie@coachingtransformations.com