Inna Shukshina

Good day! This is Inna Shukshina, your personal coach, and today I want to discuss the question — why does anyone need consultations at all, especially paid ones? Would it not be better to save the money and find the answer in books?

Why does anyone need a personal trainer or coach? I used not to need people and their help much; it seemed to me that I could develop on my own, I reflected a great deal by myself and devoured an enormous amount of literature, both online and in books. Besides, I did not trust psychologists or trainers. I had a great many questions — how do you give each other attention and love in a marriage when a child takes up all your time and sometimes you simply have no strength, either physical or emotional? How do you find your calling if you have abilities for everything and do not know which one is yours? How do you improve your mood, how do you make life bring joy and satisfaction, and what is happiness anyway? How do you combine spirituality and wealth, what are my goals in life at all and how do I find myself?

There was a wish to act, a great wish to solve the problem, but I did not know exactly where to go, whether the direction I had chosen was the right one, where it would lead — as if there were fog ahead. Every book has its own methods, sometimes contradicting each other. I would start acting — and then at the first difficulties my motivation would drop, my hands would fall, and I could not pull myself out of it. Or the search for the right road took months and even years. Some things took me years to reach on my own. But there was a block against interacting with someone who had already achieved results and had valuable knowledge — it was frightening to trust, and who knew how it would all turn out; what if it did not help?


And at some point, when I was already tired of wandering in the fog, I tried working under a trainer’s guidance — also remotely, over the internet. And my development took off rapidly. I have tried both paths — alone and with a trainer. The downside with a trainer is that it costs money, and the downside of going it alone is that there is a lot of suffering and difficulty on that path, it is very long, and you start wondering how much the years of my not-very-happy life are worth. On the topics of relationships, self-development and finding yourself I had ploughed through everything possible, but when I had the support of someone who had already travelled that path, I achieved far more and quite quickly. This inspired me so much that I decided to become a trainer and coach and help people save years of their life, their resources, their health and their nerves.

People often ask me how much my consultations cost. The time has come to explain the principles of my work in more detail 🙂 I do not hold one-off consultations (or only extremely rarely); I hold only the first, diagnostic one — free or paid. The counselling method I work by holds that it is impossible to achieve positive, lasting change and significant results in 1–3 consultations; the inner restructuring of a personality needs at least 3 months (9 meetings) — the basic programme. The extended programme is designed for 6 months, and the biggest changes come after the year-long programme. If a person’s problem is not very serious, I can offer them a place in a group training over 2 evenings, or suggest they read my articles, but for serious change — only a series of consultations, which is sold as a package straight away. Because the result matters to me and I do everything to make the client’s progress effective. I am not interested in simply working through the problem of a stranger who will then leave, with no way of knowing what happens to them next; I take responsibility for making the work produce results. And I do not take on everyone.

Let me tell you what happens in the first, diagnostic consultation and what its benefit is, even if we do not go on to work together:

• During it a person can speak out, feel that they are heard and understood,
• crystallise their problem and find the right words to describe it,
• understand how important it is for them to solve this problem
• assess whether they can cope with it on their own or would do better with my support
• decide what result they want to achieve, in what time frame, and feel how life will change afterwards
• make sense of their thoughts and feelings (as far as that is possible in 30–60 minutes)
• get a recommendation on what can be done right now — for simple questions
• hear more about my coaching programmes (individual work over Skype until a result is reached) and decide whether they need to take part in them

I hold coaching meetings both by voice over Skype and in writing.
And here is a client’s review of what helped her decide on paid work with me, and her review of the first consultation:

“Deciding on lengthy paid sessions means you stop hiding from the problem, acknowledge that it exists and cut off the line of retreat: working means working. There is a goal — you have to move towards it. Besides, clearly posed questions and the requirement to formulate your request more precisely are in themselves already work on the problem. If the discomfort has a name, and if that name has been spoken, the discomfort takes on an outline and work on the problem becomes simply work on the problem, rather than a battle with a thousand phantom shadows.”

If a person hesitates, perhaps the problem has not yet ripened and does not trouble them that much. But if the problem gets in the way of a happy life, it is unlikely to dissolve by itself. That does happen, but is it worth hoping for?

At the moment I already have almost the maximum number of clients signed up for the coaching programme that I can handle; I can take only 1 more, at most 2 people. I cannot take many people, because I think about each of them, empathise with them and put together an individual programme — this takes a lot of resources. So if you are hesitating, come to a diagnostic consultation and make up your mind; there may be no places for another 3 months after that — 3 months of living with the problem instead of 3 months of moving towards solving it. Write to Skype desnly or on VKontakte https://vk.com/id771070

The most important thing in my work for me is to see how, in a miraculous way, a person moves from a dead end to seeing new horizons, relaxes, starts to see the joy of life and to bring to life what they have long dreamed of!
This is very valuable and important both for me and for people!

Inna Shukshina, family relationship consultant, personal coach