The ten-minute self-coaching session I use to unblock, recharge, and find my focus
I am a planner. Whenever I say that, someone inevitably (and gleefully) says something like, “the best laid plans!” or “life doesn’t go according to plan” or some other saying my mom has also told me a million times. I could respond with any number of counter-quotes about how plans rock, but I don’t. I just keep planning.
Typically, the end of June is a great time for me. I assess my successes from the year thus far, I organize my goals for the rest of the year, and I plan. Oh, I plan.
For me, planning isn’t just a to-do list. Planning is daydreaming, goal-setting, doodling, and testing my limits. I set high stakes and high standards. I make plans and then I change them, but I do make them—I think the difference in the past few months is that I have had very little control over the changing part. Plans changed whether I wanted them to or not, leaving me with more of a capsized-canoe-feeling.
The past six months, my friends, have shot every single one of my life plans to shit. So what on earth is a planner to do?
Alleviate the pressure and replace elaborate plans with simple coaching sessions
For almost thirty-five years, I had my foot on the gas. I’ve done some amazing things that way. I also completely, utterly, totally burned out. It just so happens that my burnout was followed by a global pandemic and racial justice movement. So we’re all in this together, friends!
Throughout my entire professional career, I’ve been a manager. Over the past few years, I’ve moved from straight management to more of a coaching habit. It’s more effective, engaging, and inclusive. When I coach, I guide my coachee on a path to discover and formulate their own solutions. I’m caring, direct, empathetic, and understanding. Unfortunately, I never offered myself the same courtesy.
Over the last few months, as I incorporated mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and sleep into my (still grueling but far more favorable) daily schedule and the world continued to slash each and every one of my plans to bits, I thought: why don’t I take a break with the long-term plans, relentless obsession with solving every single one of life’s problems, and outrageous standards and be a little kinder to myself. I’m never going to stop being an ambitious, energetic, problem-solver. But maybe I can treat myself the way I treat others. So I started self-coaching. Here’s the ten-minute check-in I do every week or so.
Don’t use your fancy notebook
Or if you do use a fancy notebook, you can’t be one of those people who is afraid of “messing up” a notebook. Artist Kat Johnson and her friend came up with a term for it: atelodemiourgiopapyrophobia – the fear of imperfect creative activity on paper. I used to have it bad. I still have it kind of bad.
Get a piece of scrap paper of even junk mail. Tear it up after. Or burn it! That’s dramatic. No one is going to see this. You don’t even have to be able to read it yourself afterward (sometimes, I’ll write with my eyes closed to stay truly in the moment). The act of thinking and writing is most important.
Get into the right headspace
When I need to clear my head and devote my full attention to something, I like to do a quick exercise that I just call “thoughts on the shelf”. Here’s the script I use and a recording, in case you’d like to listen on your own:
Close your eyes or soften your gaze. Try to sit with your feet flat on the floor and your hands resting lightly in your lap or on your thighs. Let your shoulders drop and your shoulderblades drip down your back. Imagine a string is lifting you up from the top of your head so your spine is straight and stacked. Unstick your tongue from the roof of your mouth, unclench your teeth, and tuck your chin just slightly.
Take long, full breaths, in on a four-count and out on a four-count, letting the air fill your lungs and expand your belly. As you continue to breathe natural, long, full breaths, imagine your thoughts in your head. They can be little books, balls of light, rolled-up scrolls of paper, dots, anything at all. Picture them floating or ricocheting or zipping around in your head. Now picture something in the room next to you that could hold these thoughts: a bookshelf, a basket, a bowl, a coffee table. One by one, pluck the thoughts from your head and put them on the shelf. After you’re done your coaching session, you can go back and pick them all up and put them back in your head (or leave the ones that don’t serve you!), but for now, pluck out one after the other and set them aside until you have a clear headspace. Now open your eyes if you have closed them and pick up your pen and you’re ready to go.
Create psychological distance
Psychological distancing is a technique we can use to step away from a situation, emotion, or event in order to gain perspective. It allows us to move back physically, mentally, or emotionally, assess the issue, and decide on a course of action while being less influenced by the potentially high emotions of the moment.
Psychological distance allows us to zoom out from the small picture so that we can see events and experiences as part of a larger process (life!). It allows us to create space between us and the people, events, and emotions around us.
Think about a time in your life that was really stressful. It was probably more stressful when it was happening and less stressful after some time has passed, so that’s temporal distance. But we don’t always have time to wait for our emotions to fade and perspective to take root. By practicing psychological distancing, we’re trying to get to the less stressed version of ourselves that has some perspective quicker, so we can be our own coaches. Check out this post for a deep dive into psychological distancing and how to find the method that works for you.
Ask yourself these coaching questions
Once you’re in the right headspace, you can move on to your self-coaching. I like to let my mind stay loose, a bit like a daydream, and let the answers to the questions rise to the surface like bubbles in a lake. The framework I use for myself is the same one I use when I coach other people.
What did you want to talk about today?
Is there anything else?
What seems to be the real problem here or thing you’d like to focus on?
In an ideal world, what is the outcome or what does success look like?
What’s an action you can take to get you there?
When I’m talking to another person, obviously the conversation takes natural deviations, but it always follows the same arc: subject, real subject, problem, ideal solution, action to get to that solution.
What did you want to talk about today?
For me, this is usually the thought that evaded my mindfulness exercise and is still ricocheting around in my head, or was so swollen that I couldn’t get it out. What is the thing that is weighing on your mind? I freewrite about this for thirty seconds or so.
Is there anything else?
What’s really going on? Sometimes I’ll close my eyes again, remind myself that no one is going to see this (except for you, now, because this is a real session of mine), and let a few more bubbles rise up from the bottom of the lake.
If my answer to the first question was something like I don’t feel like I have enough time to do all of the things I want to do, the answer to the second question might be a little deeper, like I feel like I don’t have enough time to work on my novel because I keep adding things to my plate, and I think it’s a coping mechanism because I’m close to finishing and I’m afraid of being done and having to show it to people. Fun, right? Take a deep breath, because the second answer is usually the one you’re going to work with.
What seems to be the real problem here or thing you’d like to focus on?
Why are you doing this coaching session in the first place? What’s really standing in your way? Again, this is usually several layers deeper than the answer to What did you want to talk about today? My real problem isn’t that I don’t have enough time. It’s that I’m using coping mechanisms to prevent myself from writing because I’m afraid of finishing my book. I’ve been working on it for about two and a half years now and I’m many drafts in—but now it seems like I’m closing in on the “final” draft. Too scary. Don’t want it. So the real problem is that I’m packing my schedule at my prime writing times to avoid finishing.
In an ideal world, what is the outcome or what does success look like?
Again, no one is looking over your shoulder. In a perfect world, what would you want the outcome to be? In my ideal world, I finish editing my book in the next two weeks. Oh shit. Did I just write that down? Yeah...okay...success is me being done with edits in two weeks.
What’s an action you can take to get you there?
There are very few instances where you can’t take some small action to make your ideal outcome a reality. Have debt? You don’t have to figure out a way to eliminate it all in one sitting. Set up a little automatic payment today. Hate your job? Staying in a cycle of getting depressed, scrolling job boards, making a list of potential positions, then doing nothing about it isn’t going to get you a new job. Put an hour on your calendar to refresh your resume.
I’m supposed to finish editing my book in two weeks. My fake issue was not having enough time to work on my book, my real issue was me stuffing my calendar with meaningless nonsense as a coping strategy to give me the excuse that I don’t have enough time. My action is booking an hour on my calendar every morning for the next two weeks to edit. Unless I’m bleeding from the head or one of my cats is choking, I shouldn’t let anything get booked over those hours.
Make a SMART(ER) goal
Those are just examples of small steps above. You’re the expert of your experience, so it’s up to you to choose the action. Many people have heard of SMART goals. Most of the time, you’re setting them without realizing it. I will write one new blog post this week is a normal sentence. It’s also a SMART goal. Easy! I use SMART(ER) goals:
Specific
MeasurableAchievable
Relevant
Time-bound
Excellent! (celebrate the success)
Reward (positive reinforcement)
Through my work teaching people how to defeat impostor syndrome, I added the ER: Excellent and Reward. Like many people with impostor syndrome, as soon as I reach a goal, I move the target of what success looks like and it’s like that goal never existed. Then I set another goal and reach that and move the target again, and keep doing that until I burn out and still never quite feel like I reached true success. Then repeat.
The Excellent reminds me to mindfully congratulate myself for achieving a goal and take some time to process my success and the Reward is the behavioral psychology part of it where I cap the goal experience off with a reward as positive reinforcement. It doesn’t have to be something tangible, but it has to be valuable to you. You can find out more about impostor syndrome and how you can use SMART(ER) goals to defeat it here.
And here’s my SMART(ER) goal from my self-coaching session:
I will finish editing my book in the next two weeks by setting aside just one little hour a day to work on it. When I finish, I’m going to be super proud of myself for completing this portion of this journey. I know this is a major milestone and I am awesome. My reward is going to be curating the soundtrack for my book (yes, I create book soundtracks). I have most of the songs in a playlist but I haven’t let myself sink any time (honestly, I could do it for hours) into putting them in the perfect order yet.
By taking off the pressure of planning, getting into the right headspace, asking yourself good questions, and setting SMART(ER) goals, you’ll be able to stay productive while being a little kinder to yourself. And we could all use a little more of that these days.
Interested in integrating simple coaching questions into your daily conversations to make them more effective, inclusive & engaging?
Commcoterie’s free workshop, Developing a Coaching Mindset by Using Positive Communication Techniques based on the framework that our peer coaching group uses to integrate coaching techniques into our everyday communication.