Change is inevitable, ever present and experienced with ever-increasing complexity and intensity. It is within us and external to us. It is us. We are the change when we choose to live mindfully.
When we are aware of change as a constant and recognize change as an opportunity to create the future we envision, we accept responsibility for our part in the change process. This acceptance of reality in the moment empowers us to make choices that focus our attention and direct our action.
Our attitudes, associations from past events, underlying beliefs and assumptions are the filter that control what we perceive. The more stressed we are, the tighter and more rigid these filters.
Self Management starts with Honest and Grounded Self-Perception
How you experience a situation revolves around two primary dimensions – How you perceive and feel about:
- Yourself (your past, present and future)
- The situation, the context you are in.
Whether you consider the world a friendly or toxic environment is fundamental to your attitude. Feeling at home and comfortable in the world and/or feeling at home and comfortable in your skin are mirror reflections – one can facilitate the other. Why do we care?
It’s only when we are comfortable with ourselves and within the context of our lives that we can relax….and it’s when we are relaxed and comfortable that we can be our best.
Self talk (what we say to ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves) reinforce old patterns of thought and behaviour and affects how we feel about ourselves (self esteem), affecting our mental outlook, behaviour and performance. Our everyday experience is based on this mental cycle, unless we are being mindful:
Attitude/Outlook informs Perception provokes Reaction/Response informs/reinforces Attitude/Outlook.
Who’s looking back at you when you look into a mirror?
Awareness is the greatest agent of choice. Awareness is fostered through cultivating a non-judgmental attitude. Appreciating the value of unprejudiced observation enables you to discern real threats from manufactured FEARs (False Evidence Appearing Real).
Unless we pause to reflect on our experience, this pattern just keeps getting deeper, more engrained. We become locked in our attitude and unable to shift our perspective. Seeing the world and our experience in the same old way, doesn’t allow for new insights and we find ourselves feeling stuck, spinning our wheels and frustrated or defensive, having to prove something all the time, and how exhausting that is!
Coaching Facilitates Change
A professional coach is a change management expert helping you focus on what matters, remove your blinders and challenge assumptions, to help you embrace your gifts and talents and play to your strengths to design and implement strategic step by step action that can help you bridge whatever gap you may be facing and when coupled with Therapeutic Touch energy healing sessions, can lead to healing and positive transformation.
The process of coming to clarity frees up energy formerly tied up in fear, doubt and anxiety. Once freed, this energy can be redirected into productive activities. Navigating change on your terms is what coaching facilitates.
As Peter Drucker so beautifully expressed, “Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody – either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different of more effective action.”
Learn more about our 12 step journey and get yourself on the path to mindful, authentic personal leadership.
About Julia von Flotow
