Change Part 3: Change me — I paid for it!
„Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.“ Barack Obama
You are the one who composes lyrics about happiness, who creates the story of existence, who writes the middle and the ending of the book called life. No one will do it for you . It is your responsibility. Of course, there will be people on the way supporting you (family, friends, lovers) but in the end it is you who needs to bring the change and create the best version of the identity we refer to as “I”. Even a life coach — for many people nowadays a valid solution to deal with problems and bring the needed transformation — cannot change you without you doing the “heavy lifting”. It is your responsibility.
“Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.” — Carol Burnett
Tony Robbins once said that “I am not your guru” (there is also a Netflix documentary with the same title, which I can really recommend). This statement seems easy to understand — yet most people who hire a professional coach misinterpret what it actually means: A coach is not a spiritual teacher who tells you what to do and how to live by. On the contrary, a coach will offer you a setting where you can learn something about yourself and grow personally. He can facilitate the process of self reflection by asking certain questions — questions only you have the answer to. A coach can´t tell you what parts of your life to change — you have to decide for yourself what area needs improvement. But what he can do is that he can support you to change these aspects in your life by giving you tools and techniques that have proven successful — but you actually have to start using them. Because only when there is an intrinsic driver you have the motivation and resilience to take the actions needed to change and stick to them in the long run — you have to be committed towards your goals. A coach can act as a trusted partner who listens and does not judge you, a coach can act as a motivator who instils new drive into you, a coach can even act as some sort of a friend. However, what a coach can not do is acting for you so that you change.
Yet, people often blame coaches for failing to change their behavior, often relapsing into old habits after some time. Here is an illustrative example adopted from Tony Robbin´s program Unleash the Power within (here is the audiotape to the program):
During one of Tony´s early seminars he was approached by a former client who had a smoking therapy session with Tony some years back. Back then, the guy was smoking for 16 years, 3–4 packs a day, and then took a 1-hour session (imagine only 1 hour) with Tony and stopped smoking for 4 years (for 4 fucking years after smoking for 16 years). But the change was not lasting and the client started to smoke again after these 4 years. Consequently, he went to one of Tony´s events to tell him that he had failed. This is what Tony responded: “You smoked for 16 years, 4 packs a day, I work here for an hour right, you do not smoke a cigarette for 4 years and I screwed up?”. The Client: “Yeah that is right since you did not program me properly. You failed to change me.”
The most important thing here is the exact language being used by the client. He assumes that it is Tony´s responsibility to do something, that the action is on Tony and not on the client himself. But this is exactly not how it works. Tony elaborates during the Unleash the power within seminar that you have to condition yourself, create a thriving environment and make the new behavior part of your lifestyle . If the client was able to quit smoking for 4 straight years and then started again he screwed something up, not his coach. Maybe he failed to implement a new lifestyle where smoking is not a part of it. Maybe he failed to rewire himself in the way that he never would start smoking again. Whatever it was, it was probably not Tony´s fault — I mean how could it possibly be, it was four years later.
Tony further explains during his seminar that if a coach is doing the change for you, the coach would get better in training the “muscle” not you. Just imagine that your coach goes to the gym with you and does the rep to show you how it is done. If you never do the rep by yourself and condition yourself to constantly go to the gym, you would not gain any muscle. We need to understand that we are the source of change and that a coach can only give us an impulse and techniques to create lasting change. People usually forget that after having consulted a coach that they themselves have to put in effort to change their lives and stick to the changes which of course requires a lot of willpower and commitment.
How to create such commitment and willpower I will outline in my next post “Change Part 4: How to create lasting change”.
Cheers, Nick
PS: What are your experiences with coaching? Have you ever had a coach? Feel free to answer the survey below and tell me what you think about this topic :)
