Ep #60: Self-Coaching Blocks

Hello, Empowered Principals, welcome to episode 60.

Welcome to The Empowered Principal Podcast, a not so typical, educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy, by refining your most powerful tool: your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach, Angela Kelly Robeck.

Hello, my empowered leaders, how are you guys doing? It is Presidents’ Day weekend for y’all. I hope that after that sugar rush of Valentine’s that you are hopefully enjoying a lovely three-day weekend. And, for some of you, maybe even a full week break.

In my former district, we had the entire week of Presidents’ off, as do many other Bay Area districts. And we called this Ski Week, because lots of families head up to Tahoe and other ski resort areas, just so they can get up on those slopes and play in the snow. It is so much fun. I love Ski Week. And I especially loved having that week off because my birthday is on the 22^nd of February, so I rarely had to work at school on my birthday.

I can only think of one time where my birthday landed on the Monday that we came back to school, and I was a school principal at the time, so the kids made a big deal about it. They sang me a song at our leopard launch. It was a blast. Anyway, most of the time, I got to celebrate away from school, and that was truly, truly fun.

So, if you are off for a three-day weekend, good for you. May you enjoy that downtime. But if you are back at work, this is a great podcast to tune into because we are going to talk about questions that people have about self-coaching and some of the blocks that will come up when you start to practice coaching yourself on a regular basis.

So, I’m going to cover – it’s almost like a Q&A or FAQ kind of a thing. we’re going to talk about some of the blocks that we have, some of the questions that come up in coaching when my clients start to coach for themselves and they get stuck, these are the questions that they ask.

So, question number one is always, like, how do I coach myself? Like, what do I actually do? So, let’s start with some of the questions that my clients ask when they’re working with me. And that first question is always how. How do I self-coach? I’ve described the process for getting started with self-coaching in the last two episodes, so be sure to tune back into episodes 58 and 59 to get a detailed description of how you coach.

But if after listening you are still unsure, please reach out to me personally and just ask the question. Tell me what the block is. You can just email me and I’ll help you with it, no problem. But don’t not coach yourself because you think you don’t know how, that would be giving up on yourself or quitting before you even start. You don’t want to do that.

You want to try and practice this. But in its most basic form, what you are doing when you self-coach is that you are asking yourself why you feel the way you do and how you want to feel instead. And the reason I focus on the emotion aspect of the STEAR Cycle is that is typically what gets our attention; the way we’re feeling.

So, I want you to write down the thoughts you have about whatever situation you’re in or whatever situation you’re thinking about, write down, what do you make that situation mean? What’s your brain saying about it? What’s the story about the situation?

Write all of those thoughts down and notice which thoughts feel emotionally painful. So, for example, if I’m at work and I’m writing down – let’s say today, right before this podcast, I had to stop and do something technical that I hate taking time to do. I got a new laptop and I had to transfer all of my podcast episodes and all of my files from one USB to the other because this new computer only has USBC, it doesn’t have USB, so I had to do all of this rigmarole.

Anyway, it bothered me. I could write down all of the thoughts about this story, that situation that bothered me – it’s taking too much time, I don’t want to do this right now, I want to be recording my podcast instead, technology’s annoying, whatever was going through my head. You just write it down like a story. There’s no right or wrong thoughts here, guys.

Write them down. Know which ones are painful for you – see, I’m all worked up now – and pick the ones that are the most painful and run a STEAR Cycle on them, because you’ll start to see how a thought generates a feeling which triggers how you approach your day.  And that’s going to impact the results you get. And what you’ll start to notice is that the results that you get actually reinforces that thought.

It’s almost like you’re creating evidence for that negative thought.  So you have to stop that. You have to stop the cycle. So let’s take a school example, if you’re thinking – this one’s so typical of me – that parent, I like her but she’s so challenging to work with. She just talks too much or she’s voicing her opinion too much, whatever your thoughts are. But when you think and perseverate on that parent being difficult or challenging to work with and your emotion, every time you think about her and how chatty she is, your emotion might be irritation.

And when you’re irritated, you’re going to act upon that irritation in some form. Now, you might not outwardly be rude or disrespectful or irritated with her, but energetically, you’re showing up with irritation or with some resistance to working with her. And in result, what’s going to happen is she’s going to be irritating to work with. She’s going to do or say something that’s annoying you.

And that’s because you’re looking for a confirmation bias and you are proving your thought true. Your brain is trying to prove itself true. So, if you’re choosing to believe that thought, you’re going to create the result of that belief, which is then more evidence that it’s true. It’s so crazy, but it really does work that way.

Question number two, how long will it take to feel better? So this, by far, is the question I’m asked – after how do I do the self-coaching, they’re like, whoa, I started to self-coach and I’m feeling terrible. How long is it going to take to feel better? And my answer is brilliant.

People will say, like, I get the theory of the STEAR Cycle and I believe it because I can see it on paper and I can see how it works, but I find myself spinning in negative emotion. This feel terrible. How long is it going to take? And this is where they get the answer that they want and the answer that they don’t.

And my brilliant answer is this; it takes as long as it takes. Feeling better can happen in an instant. It can also take days, weeks, months, or even years. It all depends on when you are ready to let go of believing that thought and the thought that’s generating that negative emotion.

So a lot of us hold onto it. One of my mentor coaches calls it a wubby, or your little story-fondle – you’re fondling your story, you just want to hold onto it like your little lovey blanky, because we’re attached to our stories. The minute you decide to detach from that story and not believe it’s true anymore or make it mean something different for you, that’s when you feel different.

And I get it, it just depends on when you’re ready to let that go because some thoughts are much easier to let go of than others. So, think of a time you’ve been driving – this is a good one – think of a time when you’ve been driving and someone cuts you off. If you drive like I do, in that moment, you might get really ticked off and you start yelling or driving more aggressively. Your brain is stewing on it while you’re driving to work and you’re on your commute, but your brain, it’s spinning on that thought, that guy or gal shouldn’t have cut me off, that was so rude.

And you are fully committed to that thought and what your brain made it mean. And your brain’s making it mean, like, that person was rude, that shouldn’t have happened to me, that made me mad, I’m in a hurry, how dare you. And you are spinning on that for the rest of the drive.

Now, when you get to your destination and you go on with your day, like you grab your work bag and your laptop and you go in and you start working, your brain totally forgets about that commute for the most part. You’ve dropped it completely. Your brain is onto thinking about the work of the day.

And that is how you know that you can drop a story immediately. So something that feels painful to you, it is possible to do that depending on how attached you are to believing that the story is true. So, on the other hand, our belief systems that are deeply ingrained into who we are as people – and I think of things like money values, our work ethic, our religious beliefs, our relationship interactions, those kinds of fibers of who we are and the brain, how it associates with what is and what isn’t and what should or shouldn’t be – those things that are super deeply rooted into us for a long time, those take more time and energy to dissolve.

You see, many people believe that in order to make money – this is an example – like a lot of us believe this; in order to make money, one must go out and get a job and work for an average of 40 hours a week, or maybe more, and we get paid for the amount of time and energy and effort we put into our job. It’s really hard to change that belief because our brain has had so much practice and evidence to point to that belief being true.

So, from a very young age, we are taught what to value from our families and teachers and anybody who’s had an influence on us as a younger person. So it can be very challenging to take a look at what we value and question if those beliefs and values are still serving us. So, some thoughts, you can just – like the driver, poof, it will be gone in 10 minutes, 20 minutes. Others, you are looking at this like, why am I still feeling this way or thinking this way? It’s been a year. I’ve been coaching on money for a year, or I’ve been coaching on my relationship for a year. Why is it taking so long?

That’s because we have so many more layers and so many more stories that prove to us, nope, that thought is true. It can be very challenging to take what we value and question it. For example, if you were taught that being polite meant not speaking up when you have a different opinion than somebody else and that it’s very, very good, it’s a very good girl to be polite, then you might grow up to become an adult who struggles to speak up and have your ideas heard. And I’m sure you’ve experienced that before.

Self-coaching can take longer with those belief systems like these because we see them as absolute truths and we don’t think to question the values that have been instilled in us, because to our brain, that’s just the way of the world. And I also believe that we attach meaning, like, oh but grandpa and grandma taught me that or mom always said and I love my mom so I should believe what she said because I love her, I should take on her value system, I should take on grandma and grandpa’s or auntie and uncle’s.

We want to attach our love to those people through our belief systems. And it isn’t until we’re really willing to be open to questioning those thoughts and if they’re serving us now in this moment today for the better. We’re not going to feel relief until we’re open to the possibility of questioning them. And we attach deeper meanings to our values because of the people who taught them to us, typically, are very loving and we don’t want to question because it puts your brain in kind of an argument.

So, the answer to how long it will take to feel better is, it will take as long as it takes. And I’m sorry, because so many people are, like, frustrated with that answer, but it’s the truth.

Question number three – I love this one too. So, why do I need a coach if I can learn how to self-coach? Like, why do I need you?  And I think that’s awesome. I don’t want people dependent on my coaching services forever and ever, I just know that, one, it takes time to – it’s one thing to learn something cognitively. It’s another thing to apply it and learn it. And we all know this because we all make resolutions at the beginning of the New Year and we don’t follow through with them.

So, this third question I’m asked, oftentimes, either with a prospective client or with a client I’ve had who wants to continue working with me but is not sure if she should or how long should she work with me, and I have to help her sort through all of that.

So the question is this; now that I’ve learned to self-coach, why would I need to hire a coach? And I love this question so much because I used to ask myself the same question. I used to think, okay, you hire a coach, you work with them for a few weeks or months, and then boom, you’ve got this.

And I was thinking, well I’m going to be trained as a coach, so why would I need a coach? Whoa, I found out that my brain needs a coach, and I’ll tell you why. It sounds like you should be able to learn and apply and integrate into your life. That’s how it feels it should happen, but that only happens over the course of time.

And the problem with not having a coach when you’re starting to self-coach is twofold. One, you will always, always have problems in life and there are going to be thoughts that cause painful emotions. That’s just part of being human. And number two, we have, what we call in the coaching world, blind spots. There will be thoughts impacting your life that you cannot even see or even know to question. They’re just completely out of the realm of your awareness.

This is why we believe we have problems in the first place, because we wouldn’t have the problem if we knew how to solve it. And as we grow and learn, we’ll always be faced with new situations and we won’t have the answers for solving them because we’ve never solved that problem before. And people like you and I, who are very driven to evolve, will continually find themselves with new problems because they’re willing to face new situations that generate new thoughts, new emotions, and guess what, new problems.

And working with someone outside of your own brain can help you see around your blocks and question the things that you otherwise would have no way of realizing you were thinking. Have you ever had an experience like this before? Perhaps you’ve been at a meeting and someone asks a question and you think, whoa, that was a great question, I’d never even thought of that. Or, you hear the question and you get this brilliant response, you’re like, I never would have come up with that on my own.

It happens all the time for me in coaching masterminds as a client. My group will be talking about something in the business and someone will ask a question and I think to myself, dang, I didn’t even know I had to do that or think about that or even ask that question. So having other people push me to expand my thinking and blow my mind expedites my own empowerment and therefore my ability to help others.

So this is true for you. You can learn to self-coach – and I self-coach most of the time, but I still get stumped. I still reach out to my mentor coaches. I still ask for help, I still spin in redundant cycles and I’m like, why am I still thinking this way, why am I not changing this? It’s easier said than done. So it’s one thing to listen to the podcast and apply these – and you can apply them to some things that you feel are easier.

I know one of my clients just texted me the other day, she’s like working on a relationship issue at work, and she said, maybe I should have started with somebody easier. I said, no this is the perfect person for you to work on this with.

So, we also have thoughts that we cannot fathom another way seeing around. This is another block that we have. Just the other day, I was coaching a different client who was very attached to her own story. She felt so terrible because she made a decision that impacted a student’s placement and the student was not happy about it.

Her heart was very broken over it. I felt really for her. She was really upset about it. But then, I asked her this question; did you make that decision out of love or out of fear? And she thought about it and she said, love; I really want the best for this student and I feel my decision was in the best interest of that student. She said she’d never thought of it from that perspective, like how was she making this decision? Was it out of love, fear, anger, grief, where was she coming from?

And she realized, no, this was truly out of love. Like, I want this child to be as successful as possible and I want this decision to hopefully put them on a path that works for them because what her brain was making it mean was that my decision created a negative impact on a student. So she was able to turn her brain around, like, in the moment. She’s like, wow, I made this decision out of love. I’m going to choose to think that thought versus my decision created a negative impact on a student.

So her new thought was, as a principal, I make decisions for my students from a place of love. How much better does that feel? Our brains cannot always see around our own blind spots, you guys. That’s why it’s really helpful to have a mentor or a coach to help you navigate through those sticky thoughts or those sticky stories, I call them. So, when you’re really stuck on a story, it’s nice to have somebody who’s completely away and detached and neutral from the story to help you see around it. We need one another to hear our thoughts and shed a different light on them.

Okay, before I wrap up, I want to mention a few common blocks or frustrations that come up for clients when you are new to self-coaching. This will be helpful to know ahead of time so that when you experience them, you can say, I recognize this, I see you, I got you. It helps you keep moving forward versus giving up or avoiding the work altogether. And it’s so easy to avoid. At least that’s what my brain likes to do. It likes to say, no thank you, and I say no, no thank you to you, we’re doing this.

So, block number one, my favorite, self-sabotage. I’m going to use myself as the ideal example for this block because I am so brilliant at self-sabotage. I’m extremely distractible and I hate following a rigid schedule. Yet, I know that giving myself scheduled time, open-ended time for self-coaching, and working on my blocks, will end up in one of two ways.

I’m either going to avoid and distract myself for so long that I don’t get to it, or I have too much time available in my schedule when I just leave it totally open and free that I haven’t set a timeframe or a deadline to get it done and that every task I end up doing takes me so much longer to get it done. Either rending, whether I avoid doing it altogether or I spend crazy amounts of time doing it, either way is a result of self-sabotage.

Your brain has its own little sly methods of avoiding things it deems painful, boring, or hard, any of those things. So, when you sit down to self-coach and you’re instantly drawn to Instagram or you have to, all of a sudden, go to the bathroom or get a drink of water, then you can stop yourself and realize, all of a sudden, I’m popping into self-sabotage.

It’s an avoidance technique, right? And I know the struggle is real. I know it. So what are some self-sabotage fixes? And the answer is this; little teeny baby turtle steps. When you start to self-coach, first of all, choose a time of day that you’re most excited to do the work. And for most people, it’s either the first thing in the morning or at the end of the evening before bed.

So decide what works for you and make it a part of your morning or your evening routine so that it becomes naturally consistent. Once you’ve selected a time, allot only five minutes. You can do anything for five minutes. And if five minutes feels like too much, make it three minutes. Whatever it is, the reason I say this is you want to break it down into such a small step that your brain sees it as super easy and as a sure winner.

I only tell myself I’m going to exercise for five minutes. Some days, it is only five minutes and I’m like, well, that’s done. And other days, once you get going and the momentum is there, boom, you’re in. So, make it so easy that it’s a sure winner. And if you notice the resistance creeping up, just acknowledge it and refocus your brain back to your coaching works. That’s all you do. Turtle steps is all about making a new habit so easy and so painless that you cannot help but be successful.

So, maybe a turtle step for you is to set your journal next to your bed each night. You don’t have to write in it, just place it on your nightstand. Do that for a week. After that’s a habit, maybe you put your pen on top of it for a couple nights, or maybe you promise I’m going to open my journal, and then you go on and on each little turtle step until you’ve made coaching a habit that you do without much thought.

Coaching block number two, feeling stuck. For clients who are eager to get to work on self-coaching, we’ll often run into the feeling of being stuck at some point. They feel like they are coaching on the same thought over and over again without any change. Guys, this is totally normal. This happens as you start to be aware of a more deeply rooted belief that you might need some more time to wiggle loose.

Now, just because you’re in a loop, doesn’t mean you’ll be there forever. I know it feels like it, but keep working it. I like to think of it as a tooth. You know little kids when their tooth is loose and first it’s just a tiny but wiggly, and they wiggle and they wiggle and they wiggle, and eventually their tongue can wiggle it without their finger, and eventually the tooth pops out, that’s what happens with thoughts. You might have to wiggle it for a while and you might have to work on it for days or weeks on end.

So it’s okay to run STEAR Cycles on several similar thoughts on the same topic, and it’s going to happen, especially topics like money, family, spirituality and religion, relationships, work, things that are really a part of us. We have such a detailed story, you guys, of what each of these topics mean. And in order to feel unstuck, you’re going to have to examine one thought at a time and unravel the entire story. That’s why it feels like it takes longer.

We also feel stuck when we want to force ourselves to think a new thought. We just want the pain to go away quickly, so we try and make ourselves believe a new thought that we aren’t quite ready to believe. And the fix for this is when you feel stuck, you can choose a thought that feels more neutral than trying to jump all the way from feeling awful and jumping all the way to feeling amazing. You can just kind of step in the middle somewhere.

We call that a bridging thought.  So, for example, if you’re having the thought, I hate my job, and you’re trying to force yourself to say, I love my job, but the thought of saying that sentence makes you want to vomit, you might start with the neutral thought of, I have a job.

Now, this thought isn’t particularly exciting, but it feels more neutral than, I hate my job. Can you feel that?  I hate my job, I love my job, I have a job. I use the image of the monkey bars on the playground. You cannot reach from one end to the other in one move. You have to hold on to one rung at a time.

And as you get stronger and bigger, you might be able to skip a rung and go every other rung or every two rungs, but you still can’t reach from one side all the way to the other. So you need that bridging thought in the middle to get you to the other side. So, try that on if you have a thought that the opposite doesn’t feel – like, it’s too far away to be true for you at the time.

Coaching block number three, shame. When you start to peel back the layers of thoughts in your brain, there may be some thoughts that you are shocked or embarrassed that you are thinking. You don’t want anybody else to ever find out what you’re thinking because you can’t even believe that you’re thinking them. And we can feel shame or embarrassment, and it’s really hard to grasp that and to look at our thoughts on the paper and say, wow, I’m really thinking some nasty thoughts.

And that vibration of shame in your body can be very unpleasant. And it’s unpleasant enough that you will avoid self-coaching. I have done this. I think every client of mine has done this at some point and I know my coaches have talked about doing it as well.

You have to remind yourself that that sentence on that page is just a thought and it is separate from who you are as a human being.  It is separate from your mind, your body, and soul. It’s just a thought, and all thoughts truly are neutral until we choose to believe them.

So when you are in the middle of self-coaching and thoughts appear that you are horrified by, allow yourself to judge the thought because that’s why you’re feeling bad, you’re thinking that the thought is horrible and that you shouldn’t be thinking it because we’ve been groomed to believe that we shouldn’t be negative ever or that negative comments are taboo.

You have to just notice it, judge it, and let it go. One of my favorite people that I follow is Byron Katie and she says, any thought that feels terrible to us is a lie. So, if you look at a sentence and it feels awful, that sentence is a lie. Her recommendation is to turn it to the opposite. Some people can’t do that right off the bat, which is why bridging thoughts are really helpful.

And if you still feel an attachment to that thought, try telling yourself that the thought must be a lie because it feels so horrible. Think a thought you want to think instead and see if you can start to feel better with a more gentle thought.

So, for example, if you have a thought – let me think about one that would make me feel really bad, like if you’re thinking negative things about your secretary, heaven forbid- my secretary was amazing. But if you are not getting along with your secretary or something’s just not vibing with you guys and you have all these horrible thoughts and judgy thoughts and then you think, oh my god, I’m a terrible person because I wrote down all these horrible things about her, you can know that they’re lies.

Those are not truths and it’s just your brain creating a story. And your brain creates a story in order to protect you, to help you stay safe. If your secretary is doing something that you don’t like, your brain makes a story around it to make it back on her. But you can gently remind your brain, like, no thank you, I want to love her, I want to get along with her, I want to see a solution in all of this. And you can think thoughts that are more gentle.

This practice of self-coaching takes time and it takes some consistency and it takes some practice – the practice of practicing. But the more you do it, the quicker you’ll be able to see that thoughts are just sentences from your mind and they are separate from who you are as a human being.

And remember, guys, every human has them. So you’re no more horrifying or have bad thoughts than the next person. We’re all thinking judgy thoughts. So, there you have it. The last three weeks, we have really hammered down what self-coaching is, what it looks like, what it feels like, how to do it, the roadblocks that come up, the questions you have.

And if we’re still coming up with questions and there are more questions that I wasn’t able to address for you today, please be sure to send your questions to me directly at angelakellycoaching@gmail.com and I will be happy and would love to help you and answer you personally. Have a wonderful, wonderful week. I’ll talk to you next week, take care, bye-bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit www.angelakellycoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.