As a coach, you are called to help your clients cultivate deeper self-awareness and access their inner wisdom on their self-evolution journey. And you can only take your clients as far as you’ve gone yourself.
This is why the best coaches have their own coaches and know how to coach themselves.
If you’re always looking for ways to serve others and help them reach their goals and dreams, why wouldn’t you want to try these techniques on yourself?
As you help your clients go within to gain life-changing insights, it’s time for you to apply some coaching tools for your growth.
What is self-coaching?
Ajit Nawalkha, the co-founder of Mindvalley and Evercoach, explains that self-coaching is a powerful tool that helps you generate changes in your daily life and move forward.
It’s based on the premise that no one knows you better than yourself and what’s right and the best for you.
In essence, self-coaching utilizes your innate ability to:
- reflect and introspect
- learn and grow
- guide yourself and navigate challenges and transitions in life
You’ve coached yourself when you were a little child without being aware of that. So you can self-coach intentionally and consciously as a grown-up to keep developing yourself into a greater version and shooting for higher stars.
Why is self-coaching important?
Self-coaching helps you tap into your inner wisdom and empower yourself from within. The more you turn within for the answers, the more self-confident you become.
Benefits of self-coaching:
- helps cultivate personal responsibility, high levels of self-regulation and self-motivation
- deepens self-reflection, introspection, and inner dialogue
- increases awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors
Most importantly, it utilizes your intrinsic motivation — your internal drive for personal growth, self-fulfillment, joy, and accomplishment.
Learn more:
- Personal growth: Here’s how to (actually) embrace it, according to Mindvalley experts
- 7 types of motivation you need to acknowledge
Coaching yourself: 5 best practices
Watch this video to learn about the best self-coaching practices and read on to find out more.
1. Goal-setting
Whether you are a life coach, a health coach, or a business coach, you start with your client by getting clear about what they want to achieve.
When you coach yourself, you also begin with assessing areas of your life and deciding on what you want to achieve in your health, career, finances, or relationships. — @ajitna Share on XAjit recommends choosing one area at a time, even if you want to improve multiple areas.
He says, “Once you are satisfied with the chosen area, you can move on to the next. The key is to dig deep and uncover what it is that you really want.”
Questions to spark your introspection:
- What is important to me in my life?
- Where do I want most to see change?
- Who’s the person I want to become?
- What’s my gut telling me?
- What would my life look like if other people’s opinions didn’t matter?
If you want to take your goal setting to another level, do the 3 Most Important Questions exercise. Ask yourself:
- What do you want to experience in life?
- How do you want to grow and develop yourself?
- How do you want to contribute to the world?
Answering these questions will give you a blueprint into your soul and will make you discover what it takes for you to know you truly lived life.
Learn more: The anti-goal guide: 3 most important questions to discover your why
2. Journaling
Journaling is a coaching technique complementary to goal setting. You can also use it as a self-coaching model for gaining insights and discovering your true desires.
We live in a world where every medium is fighting for our attention – news outlets, companies, opinion leaders, social media influencers, and even your family members and friends.
Add to it your mental chatter, and you will get a perfect formula for distractions pulling you further away from your goals and values. So journaling allows you to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to say.
According to Ajit, it’s an excellent way to put your thoughts and ideas in order by taking them out of your head into a piece of paper.
Journaling allows you to pass through your mental mess and get clarity on what you want to achieve. — @ajitna Share on XRenowned behavioral expert and therapist Marisa Peer supports that idea. She explains that we are taught in the Western world to eat, shop, watch, or do whatever we can to push our feelings away, not to feel them.
In this video, she says, “But when you push your feelings away, they come back even stronger. So the best thing you can do as a coach and self-coach is to listen to your feelings.”
On top of that, if you want to coach yourself, you want to focus on your feelings. And journaling is one of the best tools to become more aware of them.
When using it for self-coaching, you want to write down everything connected to your feelings, goals, and circumstances.
Examples of using journaling for self-coaching:
- Use the goal-setting guidance questions to come up with reflections on what’s important to you.
- Write down your goals.
- Journal what you do each day. Keep a record of your day-to-day quality of life by scoring it from 0 to 10. It will give you an insight into things that you do that make your day epic or miserable.
Questions to ask yourself:
- How do you feel about your day?
- If it wasn’t great, what could you do differently?
- What did you do today to move towards your goals?
3. Self-question limiting beliefs
Limiting beliefs are false beliefs that result in wrong conclusions about anything in life, including yourself.
It’s normal to pick some of them from our family upbringing and society. The problem is that when these limiting beliefs begin to constrain us from growth.
According to Marisa, the function of the limiting belief is to protect us from failure. It’s like a cushion that allows you to fail.
The only failure that exists is the failure to try, and if you try to change your mindset, you cannot fail. — @MarisaPeer Share on XCommon limiting beliefs to work on when you coach yourself:
- It’s too late to pursue my dreams.
- I can’t ask for what I want because I may get rejected.
- I can’t be my real self because I will be judged.
- I’m not skilled enough to become a thriving coach.
Ajit explains that as a coach, you must be able to overcome these limiting beliefs to create change in your life and the world around you.
When you hear these limiting beliefs in your head, examine them by paying close attention to your internal dialogue.
This self-coaching technique requires a great deal of introspection and self-awareness.
Questions to ask yourself:
- What assumptions am I making about this situation?
- How else can I view it?
- What am I not seeing or acknowledging?
- What could be a more empowering belief?
- What’s the easiest thing I can do right now?
- If I weren’t afraid, what would be the first thing to do to solve the issue?
In other words, you want to ask questions that move you towards the solution.
Using this tool will cultivate a solution-oriented attitude towards every challenge in your life. You will be able to identify your limiting belief as it emerges and stop it right there.
4. Build the right habits
Dr. Benjamin Gardner, an expert in social psychology, explains that habits generate an impulse to do a behavior with little or no conscious thought.
Although this evolutionary mechanism has served us well in terms of efficiency, it also hinders us from doing what we need to do to move forward.
According to the high-performance expert Steven Kotler, we aren’t living to our full potential because we are hard-wired to the habit of inferiority that makes us take the path of least resistance.
And the secret of the habit of ferocity is to automate motivation, grit, risk-taking, and autonomy. So it’s crucial to nurture the habits supporting you in reaching your goals.
Examples of habits:
- Meditating
- Journaling
- Reading
- Waking up early
- Eating healthy
- Working out regularly
- Taking personal growth online courses
You also want to examine which habits don’t serve you and replace them with the new ones that contribute to your goals.
If you haven’t implemented any good habit yet, you want to find the biggest needle mover and start practicing this habit every day until it becomes one.
For example, you can listen to guided meditations on the Mindvalley App to help you build a habit of meditation.
Start small but be consistent. You don’t want to get overwhelmed and slide back to the behavior you want to change.
Learn more:
- How to start journaling in 3 easy steps
- How to meditate: Easy steps to incorporate meditation in your life
- How to wake up early every day without feeling tired
5. Create your support system
It’s not a tool but rather a formula for perpetual self-growth. Think of it as group coaching, where accountability is the main success factor as it helps group members stay motivated and inspired all the way through.
Even if you aren’t part of any group coaching program and don’t have a coach, you can still have a support system that will empower you to stay on track with your goals.
Your network or community will also provide you with feedback and valuable ideas.
Two easy steps to creating your support system:
- Make a list of the most important people in your life
- Ask them to help you create the change you want in your life or coaching business by keeping you accountable.
Becoming a better coach by becoming a better you
Your self-evolution will translate into your client’s achievements. So grow in parallel with your clients because seeing them grow is one of the most rewarding experiences.
Master your coaching skills, deepen your self-awareness and introspection, deepen your empathy and compassion, and explore new horizons in your career and personal life – whatever it is that you aspire to achieve.
If you want to keep unfolding your greatness, Mindvalley is the place to be. It will help you constantly grow and give you one of the best support systems in the face of Mindvalley Tribe.
Welcome in.
