confidence

There’s a common misconception floating around currently where passion and purpose is concerned and the whole decision of career path.  “When I find my passion, my job won’t feel like work.” “When I’m following my purpose, I’ll be fearless. I’ll know I’ve found the right career path.  The things that used to scare me just won’t anymore.” Don’t get me wrong, tapping into passion and purpose is great.  A lot of my career coaching and leadership coaching work is geared at helping folks recognize these things for themselves and connect to them in a meaningful way.  But as far as the above statements are concerned – I hate to burst your bubble, but they just aren’t true. I’ll give you an example.  I love teaching, I love facilitating.  It’s when I’ve had probably the most moments in actual flow – those moments you lose yourself, time passes and you’re not watching the clock.  These are magical moments, as you’re completely present, mindful and 100% engaged in what you’re doing.  I often suggest coaching clients think about times when they have entered this state as a way of connecting with activities and topics that bring joy.  The more you notice a correlation between flow moments and a certain activity, it may be a good career path option to explore. There is no career path that will deliver constant flow But that doesn’t mean shifting your focus to that activity or career path will automatically bring you into an instant state of flow 100% of the time.  The human experience is way more complicated than that.  I’ve also had a lot of scary moments as a trainer and a facilitator.  Difficult participants, difficult clients, difficult colleagues.  Logistical challenges where a room hasn’t been ready, the materials failed to show up or a flash flood was suddenly headed my way with a room full of participants and no idea what to do.  Add to this my personal favorite – incomplete or incoherent course content that’s only been delivered to me a day or so before a program and I’m expected to pull off a miracle with no time to prepare.  Before every delivery I’m a little bit nervous.  There are often insecurities that come up – What if I don’t know enough?  What if I get asked a question I don’t know the answer to and look stupid in front of participants?  What if I can’t handle the challenging dynamics in the room?  Things are often coming at a facilitator a million miles a minute.  What if I miss something?  What if the feedback is negative from the participants and they express it was a waste of their time?  What if this team or coachee doesn’t get the outcome they’re looking for? I can’t recall a single delivery where I haven’t felt at least a twinge of anxiety in the run up to a session starting.  And yet I do it anyway.  Day in and day out, over and over again.  I show

There’s often a disconnect between what we want and where we find ourselves in this journey called life.  Maybe you come up with an idea of something to try or to learn, but you find yourself quickly dismissing it or finding reasons to rationalize why it would never work.  We often mistakenly perceive these things as a lack of motivation.  “I guess I just didn’t want it enough.  But when I find the right thing, I’ll know it because I’ll suddenly be motivated and filled with an intense passion!” Wrong.  Motivation doesn’t just fly out of the air when you find the right thing.  There is no right thing by the way.  Cultivating motivation and passion has a lot more to do with what voices you’re letting speak inside that crazy thing called your head, rather than the specific thing that you’re focused on. In my experience as a coach, folks typically are stuck for one of two reasons.  The answer lies in the source of the stuckness, and whether it has to do with an outer block or an inner block.  What is an outer block? An outer block is an external constraint or barrier that gets in the way of a person achieving their goal.  It’s something that needs to be planned for, managed, and actively worked.  Let’s say I’m thinking of making a career transition, and I want to move into finance.  Education will obviously be a barrier to me achieving this goal if I know nothing about numbers.  So identifying a course or a program to enroll in, using time management skills to plan for this course, budgeting for this course will be key.  Outer blocks are relatively straightforward and easy to coach.  The problem is that most of us suffer from inner blocks when there is a disconnect from where we currently are to where we want to be, when we feel stuck or are lacking motivation. The sinister world of the inner block and the inner critic In my time as a coach, I’ve never met a client (including myself) who didn’t suffer from inner blocks and the curse of the inner critic.  An inner block is a deep-seated belief that who we are and what we are just isn’t good enough and will never be enough.  We all have an inner critic.  Mine’s name is Gertie.  Here she is: Gertie loves to fly around my head at warp speed and bump into things.  She squeals with glee as she yells, “You don’t work hard enough Shelley!”  Deep down Gertie knows that I’m lazy and I’ll never do what it takes to finish that new initiative or project.  That online leadership academy I’ve been thinking about building and piloting – What a silly pipe dream!  And then I start thinking to myself, “Well, maybe it wasn’t that important after all.  Maybe I just didn’t want it that bad.” Or maybe I do, and I just allowed myself to get derailed because the inner critic

“You know what I’ve realized?  I’ve concluded that it’s okay to just be average.” I heard this from a client a few weeks ago.  He continued on to say, “For so long I’ve been worried about my image.  What others thought about me.  I would leave every interaction wondering whether I’d said the right thing.  Worried that I didn’t.  Worried about the interaction.  Did I dazzle them enough?  Wondering if they were seeing the smart and successful attributes in me that I wanted them to see.  I had to get them to realize I was special, a star.  Was I successful in getting the sale or the deal?  Wondering how if it hadn’t gone well, how I could later manipulate the situation to get the outcome I wanted.” (We all do a version of this, just in case you were wondering if this is unique.) “Sounds exhausting.”  I replied. “Extremely.”  He confirmed. “And now you’re realizing it’s okay to just be average.  How does that feel?”  I asked. “I feel free.” I smiled.  It reminded me of the moment when I realized it too.  And the feeling of serenity and intense peace that came with it.  I was so jazzed about the revelation that I even broke out into poetic genius and wrote a poem about it – The Joy of Being Average. It wasn’t a very good poem.  It didn’t even rhyme.  I even tried to find it to insert it into this blog because I thought that would make me look quite clever, but my filing system must be pretty crap because it’s disappeared.  But I swear I wrote it.  The Pursuit of Special is Stressful The image management aspect of trying to prove ourselves is exhausting.  I got told growing up I was smart.  I was special.  I believed it.  I so wanted it to be true.  And it was all very well intended appreciation meant to lift me up from family members, teachers, friends and colleagues.  But then I had to prove it.  Then I had to live up to it.  I spent a lot of time thinking about it.  My image, who I wanted to be, who I wanted people to think that I was.  An international woman of mystery, a courageous trailblazer who had conquered the globe and lived and worked in multiple countries, started my own successful businesses – twice.  I carefully crafted and perfected these stories, used to spend a lot of time thinking about them for when I would give a speaking engagement.  It had to be just right.  It had to dazzle the audience.  I had a whole wall in my office filled with degrees, certifications, accomplishments.  I ran out of room for them eventually and started putting them in the bathroom.  It’s not a surprise I did this.  It’s not a surprise my client did something similar.  Our context sets us up for it, and we unconsciously fall straight into the trap.  If you look on social media it’s

2022 was big.  Big for me at least.  Biggest revenues, biggest number of clients.  Biggest number of challenges I had ever taken on.  Explosive growth on the personal and on the professional front.  I don’t think I had ever felt as comfortable in my role as a career and leadership coach, as a leadership facilitator, a mentor coach.  The pressure was high, but I was enjoying it for the most part.  I was flying high.  I had finally arrived!  Then I Crashed and Burned And then something strange happened at the start of this year.  I started hesitating before sessions with clients.  I started second guessing my reactions to things, the words coming out of my mouth, my interactions with people.  Did I show up with a compassionate open heart???  Maybe I’m being too hard on them…Maybe that thing I just said was really stupid…What a lame question!  I’ll never be as good as a facilitator as X.  I started thinking I had lost my edge.  And then I wondered if I had ever found it to begin with. I stopped the diatribe and instead started to ponder why – why these thoughts?  Why am I torturing myself?  It reminded me of when I was a fledging yogi, at yoga teacher training in LA.  One of the opportunities of said yogic experience was being forced to listen to our esteemed guru rant on about any number of topics for hours on end.  But one rant stood out, where the guru was talking about achievement.  “Achievement is nothing.  Anyone can achieve anything they want to.  Maintaining it over time, now that’s a different story.  That’s near impossible!” Achievement versus Maintenance I think he was on to something there.  And then it dawned on me what was causing me to hesitate.  To second guess and doubt my every move.  The gnawing feeling that I didn’t have what it takes to go the distance.  The success was a fluke.  An anomaly.  And what was hiding in the wings (although very cleverly disguised) was my inner critic.  Whispering soft things in my ear like, “You should know this already.  Someone with your level of training wouldn’t be hesitating right now.  If you were emotionally intelligent you wouldn’t be over-reacting right now.” I spent this morning in tears, having a good cry.  (Crying can be extremely therapeutic if you’re so inclined to try it…) I made a list of all the things I’ve been struggling with (it was a long list in case you were wondering).  All the things I didn’t think I had gotten “right” lately.  And then I just let the tears flow.  Tears of forgiveness for all the things I haven’t navigated well over the last few months.  Things maybe I got wrong.  Or maybe I didn’t get perfect.  Because no matter how long I’ve been doing this coaching and training gig, I still: This list could go on and on by the way. And I still just allowed the tears to

On my desk I keep a small statue.  It’s a beauty pageant participation trophy I got off the internet for $4.99 plus $19.99 in shipping and handling.  I even had my name engraved on it.  She sits proudly on my desk looking at me, all smug with her right hand coyly resting on her hip, standing up perfectly straight in her big poofy skirt with her sash draped proudly over her chest.  She sits on my desk not to remind me of the beauty pageant I never won (or even entered for that matter).  She sits there to remind me of the evils of striving for perfection.  And when you think about it, many of us get caught in this trap.  We get caught in the trap, and we don’t follow through.  We get caught in the trap and we give up before we’ve even started, because whatever we produce just won’t be good enough.  We won’t be good enough.  So why even bother? Or maybe we try and we don’t exactly meet the goal, or the target.  And then we beat ourselves up about it.  Here’s an example.  I set myself the goal of writing this blog once a week on January 1st of this year.  I’ve dutifully done it every week, except one in September when I was on vacation.  And then the end of the year rolled around and I’ve missed a week or two.  And then my thoughts the other day turned to – “See!  You didn’t do it.  You never follow through!  What kind of coach are you, you can’t even finish strong when you made a big deal about starting something.  You might as well give up, you hack!” I could really listen to that voice.  Tune into and wallow in my misery of failure.  Revel in the fact that I’m an impostor that doesn’t deserve to use the word coach.  I could do all that, and don’t think I didn’t think about it.  And then I took my own advice, and remembered sometimes it’s actually helpful to practice what you preach.  One of my favorite books which I often have clients read is one called Mindset, the new neuroscience of success.  In it, the author Dweck talks about the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset.  Fixed Mindset = Proving The fixed mindset is all about proving.  Proving one is good enough, smart enough and gosh darn it, that people like you.  (I’m hoping someone will catch the Stuart Smalley reference here…)  Many of us go through life locked into a fixed mindset a lot of the time.  As a result of it, we often have difficulty accepting criticism, rising to the challenge of something new or unexpected because we might fail or collaborating effectively with others because we view them as competition.  We have difficulty because the emphasis is on proving.  I have to prove I can finish what I start, and if I don’t, I’m an impostor.  Growth Mindset

I recently participated in a leadership 360.  If you’re not familiar, it’s one of those annoying survey things where you rate yourself on a bunch of subjective questions and a bunch of other people you nominate on your behalf rate you as well.  Then you get your results and some fancy, overpaid consultant (like myself) helps you get a sense of your strengths as well as your opportunities for development (the latter meaning weaknesses in organizational development speak) and helps you put together a development plan to address the gaps. It’s interesting because as a leadership coach and trainer, I’ve administered them on other people’s behalf’s so many times, I just never had the opportunity to take one myself.  I wasn’t sure to expect.  I figured there would be a few things I would need to work on and had formed some assumptions in my mind as to what those things were.  But about halfway through the debrief, something strange happened.  I broke down in tears.  Not because I was sad, but because I was overwhelmed.  On every single measure (and there were a lot) I had rated myself significantly lower than my colleagues and peers had rated me.  Every single one. We do not see ourselves clearly How can this be?  I even course corrected for this.  I know I tend to be hard on myself, the recovering perfection junkie that I am.  I even took that tendency into account when I was rating myself and cut myself some slack.  Or so I thought… But the results say what the results say.  Here I am thinking that I have a fair degree of awareness, and yet clearly do not see myself in the same way that others do. I see this all the time in my clients.  The problem isn’t as much that we are often doing all these horrible things we are completely unaware of.  There are many assessments I’ve debriefed where a person has “soft spots.”  Qualities they rate themselves low on that others believe to be much higher.  When you think about the consequence and the cost of that, it’s huge.  If I don’t believe I’m good at something, maybe I don’t put myself forward for an opportunity.  Maybe I don’t dare to dream that big dream because I’m not sure I have the capacity to achieve it.  Maybe I find myself talking myself out of things.  I’ll go after it when I feel like I’m ready.  But what does “ready” even mean and how would I know if I’m there?  This is the circular thinking we often engage in that keeps us stuck in a rut. Life is funny like this…while every coaching client is very different, many of us are really searching for and working on the same exact things.  I’ve often explained the practice of coaching as helping others see the incredible value they bring to the world and step into their greatness.  And who better than a neutral third party, as we