This post has been a long time coming. It's interesting because I actually had something else planned for this month in August, but life happens and I've pushed back the whole series of podcasts that I had for this month to next month, which is all fine. That's what happens behind the scenes when you're running a podcast but what that means is, that it has opened up some episodes that I can now share with you about coaching, and thought work. I've been wanting to talk to you about this subject for quite some time.
If you're one of my longtime listeners/readers, and you've been following my journey, you know that when I started this podcast, I was working as a primary school teacher. Along the course of the past year, I have completely changed my career, and now work as a life coach. Day to day I coach women. I work from home and I coach them over the wonderful worldwide web using Zoom.
I want to explain to you what life coaching is and what thought work is, and how it can help you with having more money? If you've never done any thought work before, or you've never had a life coach before, you might be wondering, how on earth does it all work?
Well, over the next three weeks I’m going to share with you the main tool I use with my clients and give you some insight into how thought work works, and how you can apply it to change your life.
In the beginning, what I teach might seem so simple, that I'm guessing you might be tempted to dismiss it, but I really want to encourage you to stick with me over these next few episodes because what I'm going to teach you can have an incredible impact on your life; on how you feel about yourself, on how much money you create, and ultimately, how you feel throughout your day to day and what you do in your life. But the first thing I want to start with is just give you a little bit of background knowledge on what a life coach actually does.
What is coaching? I talked about it quite often now on the episodes and so I really want to explain to you what a coach actually is. There are different life coach schools, so depending on where you have been trained, and who you work with, the style of coaching can differ.
I'm trained through The Life Coach School. So I will be sharing the tools used by this school.
Basically, what a coach does is show you your mind. That is the number one job requirement of a coach. A coach is not a therapist. There is certainly a place for therapy with a psychologist or medical professional, but that is not what a coach is for. Coaches focus on your future. When you do a session with a coach, you might talk about stuff from your past because it's something that you're thinking about now in the present moment. But a coach is not going to get you to talk about your past trauma or make you rehash something that happened in your life 20 years ago. A coach creates the space for you to create awareness about what you're creating in the present moment. That's why coaching is so transformational and so powerful because you're working with what's happening in your life right now.
If something happened in your past that triggers you and you're constantly thinking about that, that's something a coach could definitely work with you on. You might have something from your past that you want to work on that you've been carrying around with you for a long time. For example, maybe you've always had an issue with lack of confidence or not doing something because you feel like you're not good enough.
As hard as this might be to believe if you're new to coaching, that is something that you're creating in the present moment. But we think often that we feel things and we experience things in our life because of something that happened in our past but actually we're feeling what we're feeling and experiencing what we're experiencing in the present moment because of what we're thinking about it in the present moment.
The other thing about coaching, which I want to make clear to you is that when there's something getting in the way of you moving forward, when we keep repeating the same patterns in our life, and we seem to have the same reoccurring problems; what most often happens is we think it's because of a circumstance in our life.
We think we don't have enough money because of the salary amount that we earn. We think that if we just earned a higher salary, then we would have enough money. But the interesting thing is- what many people discover is that they still don’t have enough money when their salary increases.
I always thought that if I had investments, I would feel secure. But what I learned was, it wasn't the investments that create that feeling of security. It's my thoughts about my investments that create the feeling of security. I'm going to teach you more about this. The reason why coaching works is because let’s say you go to a coach because you feel like you're bad with money and you want to work on your money mindset. You'll come to a coach with all these reasons why you think that you're bad with money, right? Because your parents were terrible with money when you were young or because something bad happened, you went through a divorce and your partner took all the money or you didn't work because you had kids. You think you are bad with money because of the circumstances of your life but the real reason is because of how you think about money and that is what a coach helps you identify.
One of the very first steps that you can do when it comes to changing your life and changing the results that you get in your life is by becoming aware of your thoughts.
What are thoughts? Thoughts are just sentences in our mind? A thought is just something that our brain thinks. I like to imagined them like those old screensavers on the computer where an affirmation would move across the computer screen?
We have about 60,000 thoughts a day, that's a lot of thoughts that we have. They can be anything from, Oh, ‘it's so cold today’, or, ‘I've really got a lot of work to get done’, or ‘I've got to remember to pay that electricity bill’. These are all just thoughts in our brain.
The very first step with all of this work is to be become aware of your thoughts. What I do with my clients is something called a Thought Download. You can do a thought download on your own, or you can do it with a coach. Same same, but different. Basically, what you do is you take all the thoughts out of your brain and you write them down on paper. A thought download can be done in different ways. You can do a thought download first thing in the morning just about whatever is rolling around in your head. Whatever thoughts are in your head you just get them out of your head and on to paper.
This gives you the space to be able to see what you're actually thinking. If you do this every day, what's really interesting is that you might discover that you're actually thinking a lot of the same thoughts. In the beginning, when you're new to doing thought work, it is really interesting to see the thoughts that you're thinking regularly.
You can do a thought download about whatever is on your mind, or you can do a thought download about a specific topic for example: you might do a thought download on your thoughts about money. Or you might do a thought download on your boss at work, all the thoughts that you have about this boss of yours. The interesting thing is, is when we write out our thoughts, or when we think our thoughts, we think our thoughts are the truth. We think our thoughts are reality, the truth of life. But in actual fact is, our thoughts are only sentences in our brain.
I'm going to say that one more time, our thoughts are just sentences in our brain. So, you might have a thought like, ‘I'm just not a confident person’, or ‘I'm not good with money’, or ‘I never have enough money’. Now to you, that might sound like the truth, and you might be able to show me a lot of evidence that you never seem to have enough money. However, that is not a fact. That is not a circumstance that is set in stone that everyone would agree on.
Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to teach you some more thought work tools. The first step is the thought download. I want to really encourage you to just take five to ten minutes a day, to write out the sentences that are in your brain, and just start creating awareness about what you are thinking.
In the beginning, you might not see the connection with what you are thinking and how it effects your life and that’s okay. So, five to ten minutes a day, you just need a scrap piece of paper or a notepad and just dump it all out. Just get all the thoughts out of your head. And here's a few tips that I'd like to give you. You don't have to show this to anyone. So, I would really encourage you not to censor yourself because often we have a thought in our head and we don't like it so we don't want to write it down. Just write it all out. You might find in the beginning, that you have a lot of negative thoughts about yourself or your life or your situation. There's nothing wrong with having negative thoughts. The beautiful thing about it is that we get to see how we're thinking. In the next few episodes, I'm going to teach you what to do about that. If you've got a lot of thoughts like ‘I'm not good enough’ or ‘I'm not good with money’. This isn't an invitation to beat yourself up. What my clients often do is they see they have a lot of negative thoughts and then they judge themselves about this. They give themselves a bit of a beat up about their thoughts. What's wrong with me? Why do I think so negatively? Why do I think all this stuff?
Please don't do that. Because it's a complete waste of time. And this is not what this is about. The reason why you do a thought download is to create awareness around how you're thinking because when you have awareness about what you're thinking, you get all your power back. You get to take agency over what you are thinking deliberately.
THe next step is learning how you can change your thinking. But that is for another episode.
I'd like to encourage you to do a thought download every day this week, just five minutes, will do it. Write all your thoughts down on paper. If you are super keen, you might want to do a little extension. Read through the thoughts afterwards and just ask yourself, are any of these thoughts actually facts? Would everybody agree on them? Or could it be proven in a court of law?
You might be surprised by the answers that you come up with. Okay, I think that's enough information for you today. I would love to hear how you go with doing the thought downloads and if you have any insights. If you have any questions about how it works or what this brings up for you, I'm available for you. You can email me here. If you've got any questions, I'll be happy to email you back and give you some clarification or any insight or coaching around it. You can also reach out to me anyway you following me? If you are interested in finding out more about thought work and how to apply it to make change in your life, this is what I do day to day with women and I would really love to help you.
The first step to working with me is to simply schedule a complimentary consultation here.
The consultation is an opportunity to tell me about your life and what's happening for you. Then I do a little bit of coaching with you, so you can experience what coaching is like and then I'll let you know whether we would be a good fit. This is exciting work and it's the first step to making lasting change in your life by getting aware of your thoughts. Until next time, have a beautiful week. Bye Bye.