Accepting All The Parts

Much of coaching and self development is focused on championing the ‘positive’ aspects of individuals and teams.

There is now a multi-million pound industry in self help books and courses all trying to help people improve in some way – stop smoking, eat well, good parenting, win more customers etc… Alongside this, we are also bombarded with Advertising which tells us that if we buy this product we will be happier in some way.

Organisations spend huge amounts on ‘fun’ team building exercises where everyone has to maintain a pretence of enjoyment.

But is it realistic to expect ourselves to be ‘happy’ (just one emotional state) permanently? Are the self help books just making us feel worse and blocking High Performance?

I believe the key to High Performance in life as well as work, does not lie in striving directly for happiness and success. If we do this we make ‘bad’ our other emotional states, such as anxiety, anger or sadness and disappointment. Once we have been socialised (by parents, school and the wider society) to think that we ‘should’ be happy and successful, then we have immediately set ourselves up for failure and the ensuing self criticism and disappointment in ourselves.

Ironically the more holistic approach to gaining a life and career that gives you enough happiness and satisfaction is to embrace the fact that we may feel anxious, angry, sad and inadequate sometimes. Once we acknowledge our true reality and stop wasting our energy trying to pretend that everything is perfect, we can start to accept all of ourselves and this is the beginning of the journey to self-worth and self-direction for our lives.

In our culture we often try and gain a sense of self-worth through external things like work status, money, our partners, having a perfect body etc… As soon as we turn away from who we really are and look for an external sign to prove our self-worth we are on the wrong path.

So when I first started Executive Coaching, I thought I would be helping clients with things like ‘motivation’, however I find more and more, that if my clients are not motivated in their jobs, its because they are not following their true path and are living out a career (and entire life) that they think will make them happy and successful, but this is a fantasy that has been fed us all as we grew up in a Western Culture. We often have a fear that if we followed our true passions, we would end up poor and lonely! So we never dare to try. The reality is that we never know if we could have done what mattered to us in life and managed to earn a living from it.

The other type of work that generally comes up in Executive Coaching is that the client is hugely motivated and working themselves into an early grave. They are trying to be ‘successful’ in every area of their lives and have forgotten about taking care of themselves in the process. It’s no good being the best, if the next day you die of a heart attack!

So ironically the key to having a happy and successful career is learning to accept all of our parts – ‘good’ and ‘bad’ and knowing that we are already good enough to have a happy and successful life, we just don’t believe that ourselves yet!