One of Many Ways to Coach Yourself

Self-coaching is flexible. The primary approach that I teach for self-coaching is to identify a self-limiting behavior (SLB) that you want to shift and apply the self-coaching path. Effectively, practice self-observation to find the persistent underlying belief (“deep story”) that is driving that behavior.

However, what if you are aware of your self-limiting belief and want to shift that directly? Here’s a way to do just that. Let’s say your deep story is “I’m not smart enough.”

1. Observe how you “show up” when that story is front-and-center in your self-talk. 
2. Ask yourself, “what actions do I notice taking or avoiding that might be related to that story?” For example, your story of not being smart enough may lead to laying low or avoiding attention, in whatever form that takes for you. (It may manifest in many other behaviors too. This varies from person to person.) 
3. Pick one of the frequent self-limiting actions, e.g., “I don’t speak up in meetings.” 
4. Use the five Coach Your Self Up challenging questions to challenge your story and experiment (in a low-risk way) with other ways to respond, act, or react. 

When you experiment with new responses (in this case, starting to speak up in meetings), it starts to weaken your story that you aren’t smart enough. Since this deep story is likely at the root of multiple limiting behaviors, you’ll start to see positive shifts in those other behaviors as well. And you’ll become more confident that your limiting story isn’t True. How cool is that!