How You Change . . . and What You Reveal

Last year, two edgy ads ran online that gripped me.

The first was for Peloton.
A few key word changes (mine – in bold ) grow the narrative to … 

This is your house.

This is you waking up.

This … is what you woke up for.

This … is your coaching program.

This is Robin. Robin is your coach today. Robin is not going to go easy on you.

This is you attacking the hill, crushing the flats,

Climbing your way through your challenges.

These are the boundaries you push together.

This … is how you change your life.

THIS … IS HOW YOU CHANGE YOUR LIFE.

This is how you make a better day for yourself, your family, and your team

Here in your home, in your work.

This is getting coached.

A great coaching experience is all this, and much more. For career advancement, for professional development, or for personal growth. To innovate from the inside out, with a trusted ally and guide. To change your life. To reach your personal best.

Getting coached well is how many people get prepared well for what’s ahead. It helps them see through their blind spots and release the limiting beliefs, stories, habits and other biased patterns standing between them and their goals.

It can also boost healthy self-control. According to mental health therapist Bonnie Badenoch, PhD, co-regulation (via interaction with others) may actually foster inner balance more than self-regulation does. Because our brain and nervous system don’t come pre-wired with regulatory circuitry: “It has to be co-built with another person.”

And co-built not just through infancy but in adulthood, too. Research on the social regulation of risk and effort suggests that our very neurobiology expects supportive relationships as we move through life. That means enrolling the good support of other people who have a shared commitment to your own growth, such as a skilled and caring coach.

Surgeon and Lifebox Chairman Atul Gawande sees all of this in terms of concrete results. As he wrote in his 2011 New Yorker essay 'Personal Best', “Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance” (according to him, that includes performing surgery, too).

How others see it

"Coaching is product development, with you as the product." Fast Company

"I absolutely believe that people, unless coached, never reach their maximum capabilities."
Bob Nardelli — former CEO of GE Power Systems, Chrysler and Home Depot

"I never cease to be amazed at the power of the coaching process to draw out the skills or talent that was previously hidden within an individual, and which invariably finds a way to solve a problem previously thought unsolvable."
John Russell — managing director, Harley Davidson Europe Ltd.

At its most sublime, superb coaching helps each of us claim our authentic self and live through that. Doing so is the ultimate interior homecoming, which Carl Jung revealed through his research and clinical work in analytical psychology. That's how inviteCHANGE CEO Janet Harvey frames authentic being; the exquisite term she applies to it is "personal sovereignty." 

. . . And that other edgy ad that gripped me last year? It heralded the launch of CBS' online TV series The Good Fight, and it ended this way:

“EVENTUALLY EVERYONE REVEALS HIMSELF.”

This year …

What are you waking up for?

What boundaries are you pushing?

What support are you gathering?

When you reveal yourself, who will you be?

*

Get coached well. Contact me to get started.

— Laura J. Nigro, MS

Support(at)SciEnspire.com

Images at top are screen shots from the online video ads cited here.

(Updated 1 Feb 2019; originally published 4 Jan 2017, on LinkedIn)