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Took me years to really get this one and sure happy I did. . .

What if the biggest and most profound results for someone didn't come from working harder or smarter, being held accountable, or even having a better logical plan?

Instead - what if the results came just feeling and having all the negative emotions (i.e. anger, sadness, grief, fear) that come up with certain tasks - instead of distracting, suppressing, or avoiding feeling these things?

I had a client several years back who took 4 years to go through a separation and divorce. I worked with him for the last 4 months of this process. One time after he had completed, I asked him if he were to take all the hours doing the paperwork, getting his taxes and numbers in order, meetings and telephone conversations with the lawyer and mediators, etc and added all that up . . .how much time would that amount to? He thought about it for a bit and said "about 7 days". Essentially the 7 days of all the stuff associated with his divorce had taken him 4 years! The big question then was - what had he been doing with the rest of the time during those 4 years? Upon closer examination, it had to do with avoiding or distracting himself from having the tough feelings that came up associated with the divorce. Much of the work I'd done with him was about standing up to what there was to do to get things complete and feel all there was to feel associated with the tasks.

Consider now, had he consciously become more adept at having the feelings, not distracting, suppressing or avoiding them right from the beginning of the process, how much faster the whole thing would have taken him. . .

Many years before becoming a coach, I was hired to work a software sales job years ago and I didn't know it at the time, but I was being hired along with about 30 other people for a "mission impossible" task of selling into accounts that no one had previously been able to sell into - including the top sales people in the company. Of course I failed miserably in the position as did everyone else hired for the role. I used to have to go in for sales meetings at 6:00 am in the morning once a week with nothing to talk about. . . meanwhile, everyone else on my sales team at the same meeting was hitting it out of the park. I was mortified and dreaded my turn where I had to share about what I'd been doing all week . . .I just thought I was a complete loser and there was nothing I could do to hide or cover it up. It got so bad that almost all of the new hires either quit, went on to other roles or got fired. I started dreading every moment of going to work, looking for other work unsuccessfully, hating my life . . .there is an expression "when in hell, all roads out of hell look like hell".

Then one day it dawned on me. . .maybe what was on the menu was to just feel horrible and surrender to those feelings I'd basically been resisting having all along. . .somehow I had myself in this corner where there was no where to run to and nowhere to hide and really the only option left was to surrender to being a total loser / failure in the job - since that was what the Universe was serving up. So that's what I did and when I got right with it and even got ok with being fired and out on the street, the pain seemed to dissipate and I even got to the point where could actually have fun with it.

Something very strange and miraculous happened then. . .at the time, I was only getting 17% of my annual quota with a month left in the sales year . . .that sort of performance would have been grounds for me to be fired with any sales role with any company, but instead, I got a promotion. I was placed into a totally new position and my income more than doubled in the next year, I took more time off for vacations, going for long walks during the day along the ocean seawall. . . Of course, that doesn't make any sense at all . . .but looking back, I can see and my best assertion was that the result certainly wasn't produced by working hard or smart but rather by just "feeling" and "having" all the emotions I'd been resisting all my life and going through my worst fears until there was no "negative emotional charge" associated with them.

Let's look at life coaching now. . .if there were one skill that was by far and away more important than anything else to get good at to have a successful practice that would be the skill of getting good at picking up new clients. Yet, notice how that's the one thing that everyone dreads, avoids, and distracts themselves from having all the feelings and emotions that get dredged up when having conversations with new people.

The actual dynamics of these conversations are not too difficult to learn to pick up someone as a new client. . .there are only a finite amount of considerations that come up for people . . .and once you learn then, having new clients ceases to become that big a deal and there is less "negative emotional charge" associated with it. . . However, what takes all the time is the "processing" and feeling one's way through all the emotions that come up in the process.

This is why, I think that's probably why the overwhelming vast majority of life coaches fail and can't make a go of it. . .and it's a well-kept secret that life coaching schools don't talk about as it wouldn't be good for business - that only a very small number of their graduates are able to establish a fully sustainable practice.

Consider what if the results of getting a life coaching practice up and running weren't about connecting with more people but rather going through all one's fears and other negative emotions associated with it?

I see a lot of new coaches keep on taking more and more courses and programs, reading more and more books, getting more and more certifications . . .almost as if to delay going through this process of feeling all their fears and other negative emotions that come up in the process of picking up new clients. Another thing I see is the desire to have a big Facebook following, wanting to build big lists of subscribers, writing a best-selling book - all in the hope that people just "sign-up" without having to have the face to face or telephone interactions and I start to wonder if this isn't a clever trick of the mind to "non-confront" having to have the emotions that come up in the face to face interactions of asking someone if they want to work with you (where someone might have all the emotions come up associated with being a loser / failure). . . I don't know if this is accurate or not. . .just a thought I had however to ponder.

One of the quickest ways to getting a business up and running I heard from my mentor and many others was to build it by having face to face conversations, doing group presentations and having telephone conversations. Why? Because it intentionally puts someone right up against the things they spend a huge amount of time avoiding.

I originally thought doing things this way was "too slow". . .I didn't want to do those things. . .but later on I saw that it had much more to do with me not wanting to have my feelings and emotions that would come up in the process . . .except . . .me having my feelings to the point where there was no more negative emotional charge would be the very thing that would produce the breakthrough results.

So that's what I did in the early years of practice. . .eventually doing hundreds and hundreds of talks, thousands of conversations on the phone with people. . .and yes. . .it was brutal having to have all the feelings in the beginning. . .but there is a "finite" amount of things to feel through and gradually the "negative emotional charge" does bleed off. I still have resistance come up to me to this day getting on the phone . . .I'm up against that even now as I reinvent my business doing deeper levels of work with people . . .but it's a very interesting phenomena. . .the more I get right with just getting on the phone and talking with people (and I'm willing to surrender to it, the more new clients keep on show up like clockwork. The more I just get right with doing the tough stuff, the more I don't have to do it for clients to show up.

The other HUGE thing I learned is that I never ever needed to be the expert in life that I was coaching. . .it's a huge burden to take on always having to "have it altogether" and think I have to solve someone else's problems, especially if I don't have everything perfect in my own life. It also creates a weird sort of dynamic where I have to give the appearance like I have everything together, the perfect image of me painted on Facebook, Instagram, covering up the rust spots and places where I don't have it together. . .brutal and exhausting having to "keep it up" and "keep it all together" in life. . . looking like I have all the answers.

Rather - where I could get the best results with clients would be creating a "space" in the relationship where they could have all their feelings and emotions as well that they'd been avoiding all along. . .and in doing so, they'd have their biggest breakthroughs also.