Coaching exercise: What’s holding you back?
Coaching exercise: What’s holding you back?
Five powerful questions to help you identify your fears, unblock them and let them go.
“Fear can have a voice, but it doesn’t get a vote”
-Elizabeth Gilbert
Stepping out of your comfort zone to change careers or start a business, is one of the scariest and most exhilarating things you will ever do. It will push a lot of buttons and bring up a lot of fears, so it’s crucial that you learn how to distinguish between your thoughts and your reality.
So grab a notepad or journal, a glass of wine or a cup of tea, and take some time to reflect on the following five questions. You could also talk through these questions with a trusted friend, family member or colleague:
1. What are the stories you are telling yourself about your career?
If you struggle to identify these, try this first. Give yourself a 24hr time limit and pay attention to every negative thought that pops into your head or negative emotion that you feel during that time. Jot them down immediately into a notepad or on a notes app on your phone and review them at the end. What do you notice? What keeps coming up again and again?
Your notes from this exercise may contain something that we call in coaching ‘limiting beliefs’, and these are one of the biggest areas which hold people back in life. Limiting beliefs are based in fear. We use them to protect ourselves and prevent us from getting hurt again, but very often they are out of date, no longer relevant and no longer serving us. The good news is that once we become aware of and recognise them, then we can start to change them.
Here are some examples of limiting beliefs:
I'm not clever enough.
I'm too old/young/fat/unfit
I'm not confident enough.
I don’t have relevant experience.
I don't have the talent.
I'm terrible with money
When I take a risk it always turns out badly for me.
Successful people are just lucky
It’s too late for me
I'm a slow learner.
My parents would be disappointed
My partner wouldn’t like that
My friends wouldn’t like me anymore
Pick 3 to work with for now and write down/discuss how they are holding you back.
2. Who told you those stories? Where did they come from?
Limiting beliefs are long standing beliefs or stories which we hold onto and which prevent us from moving forwards. We often pick them up in childhood or through early life experiences, possibly from parents, teachers, friends or colleagues.
All these fears are learned, so they can therefore be un-learned. Once you’ve labelled your fear and identified where it might have come from, then you can start to challenge it and ask yourself “is this really true?”, “where is the evidence that it’s true?” etc.
3. What permission do you need to give yourself when it comes to changing careers?
This step is about recognising that you have choices. You can choose to continue to believe the negative stories you have identified above, or you can start to reframe them or even discount them altogether. If you’re finding this hard to do (which is really normal), then move on to questions 4 and 5.
4. If you were helping a friend with their own career struggles, what would you suggest that they try doing?
Sometimes looking at an issue from this perspective can really help unblock you if you’re stuck. By taking yourself out of the situation, and imagining that you’re advising someone else, then it can help you to focus on the most important aspects of the situation and tap into the life experience and knowledge that you already have.
5. What is another way of looking at this that would help you move forward? What options do you have?
We can get stuck in certain patterns of thinking, only seeing a situation from one perspective. By asking yourself “Is there anther way to look at this situation?”, it’s a reminder that there might be more than one explanation for why things are the way they currently are. And it can help to shift your thinking from passive to being more proactive.
Have a go and let me know how you get on with this exercise in the comments section below,
Juliette x