It's only fair to share…

Do you realise that every time you speak to yourself you are actually coaching yourself? Are you empowering yourself through your own internal dialogue or beating yourself up? Is that little voice inside of you your best friend or a saboteur? How would you like to be able to train your internal coach so that it keeps you focused and motivated, especially during challenges?

Master your thoughts, master your results

Because much of our results depend on our mindset, the key to mastering our results is to master our thoughts. Our thoughts comprise things we imagine, hear, feel, smell, taste and our internal communication with ourselves. Every thought we think and/or speak acts as a suggestion. So if we tell ourselves “I can’t do it” often enough, after a while we will condition ourselves to believe this. In turn, this will affect our behaviour and our success.

If you are getting results other than what you want, ask yourself “How do I change my internal communication so I achieve the results I desire?” Having the flexibility to adapt our communication is the key to producing our desired results.

Training your internal coach

There are many techniques available to help you to train your internal coach for greater success. Here are a couple of very simple and effective techniques that you can begin applying immediately.

  1. Any time you are faced with a challenge ask yourself the question “How?”. “How?” is a very powerful question because it allows you to come up with the solutions, opportunities and options, rather than dwelling on or being stuck in the problem.
  2. Start giving yourself daily or weekly feedback on the actions you are taking. Instead of beating yourself up when faced with challenges, telling yourself all the things you could have or should have done, give yourself some constructive feedback. Sit down at the end of each day or week and write down the answers to these questions:

What did I do well today/this week?

What can I improve?

Overall, how was my day/week? (end on a positive)

This will assist you to learn and grow from your actions and help you move to the next level of your personal and professional performance. Used consistently, this becomes an extremely powerful process for training your internal coach for success.

Make room for the new

You have probably heard of the expression – empty out the old to make room for the new. Before we can achieve total mastery of our thoughts and internal communication, we first need to let go of old thought patterns (ie. declutter our mind from negative emotions, limiting beliefs, internal confusion, negative self talk and disempowering behaviours). Because to the extent that we still have old thought patterns, these will come in and distract, confuse or compromise our thinking and, therefore, our behaviour and our results.

By letting go of the old thought patterns, we will make room for the new. In turn, we can coach ourselves to great success, and truly become masters of our life.