Inna Shukshina

Today I want to share with you a letter from a client of mine who is already on his third coaching programme and has achieved excellent results: he overcame depression, stopped taking things out on those close to him, started enjoying life, solved his housing problem and found interesting work. He talks about how the coaching process felt, what was hard for him and how he overcame it.

“Clever people sometimes find it hard to take courses with a psychological trainer (a coach). Let me try to describe the pitfalls of that process on their behalf.

First of all, there is a good line about us in a Soviet children’s film: “he is talented but lazy — laziness is the scourge of many talented people”. And laziness pushes us to simplify the task, that is, to reduce all our actions to those that come most easily to us: thinking. Real actions get postponed or cancelled entirely.

Early successes are particularly helpful to this self-sabotage. We try the simplest thing on the initial burst of enthusiasm, then attribute our success purely to the fact that we “understood something” — and that is it, development stops.

Secondly, it starts to seem to us that the intellect is the main thing in this process of self-development. But no: people are creatures of two worlds, and if we do not perform actions in the real world, if we do not carry out the trainer’s recommendations even when it takes effort, we will simply roll back after the first surge of enthusiasm.

And here is why. We are often perfectionists and want either to do something that is 100% effective and thought through, or not to do it at all. And of course we choose the second, justifying it by saying that we have not yet found 100% suitable conditions (a super trainer, super methods, the money side), and since we are clever, we had better think it over for another year or two. But it is precisely real actions and concrete steps that we need, that will help us.

We do not need to wait for perfect conditions and calibrate every step. We need to do at least something. Moving forward at 50% efficiency is infinitely better than standing still waiting for a 100% calibrated step.

And often only another person, one who understands the importance of action and of imperfect steps, can help us perfectionists climb out of the pit and start taking steps. So my advice is simple: always grab at the chance to move forward, even if that chance is not perfect. Everything is perfect in a scientist’s test tube; life is a series of imperfect steps forward. Steps not only in understanding and reflection, but steps in action.

And now back to the title of the article. Sometimes we do not believe the words of support we hear from a coach, because laziness and disbelief wearing the mask of perfectionism start taking us over. We do not believe that the small step we took is in fact very important, that it matters more than judicious standing still. And when we come to believe that small steps really are very important and start taking them, then we manage to change ourselves. And it is precisely in order to believe in our own strength that we need a trainer who will prod us and praise us for imperfect steps.”

I do not take everyone for coaching — only those who pass the preliminary selection at a consultation, after filling in a questionnaire. I do not work with people who are happy with everything as it is and do not want to change anything in their life. Or with people who are not ready to do anything and simply want to listen. The most important thing for our development is precisely real action, not understanding and knowledge!

If you want to solve at last the problems you are already fed up with, book a first individual consultation — the introductory one before coaching. Write to Skype desnly or to inly@list.ru, and I will send you a list of questions, and I may have a free place in coaching for you.