© Rido – Fotolia
Self-coaching is understood as acting on one’s own responsibility, whereby the person makes the inner decision to work on him/herself with the help of different methods and possibilities in order to:
- develop personally,
- achieve set goals,
- to get to know oneself and thereby develop a realistic self-assessment,
- To recognize problems and causes
- To find clarifications and solutions of stressful situations after they have been identified,
- To dissolve belief patterns and related behavior patterns
- to check the feasibility of one’s own goals and steps.
Basically, self-coaching is not about dealing with problems. Above all, this type of integrative coaching is about identifying solutions that correspond to the person’s nature and subsequently promote his or her mental health.These goals, which can be achieved with the help of self-coaching, are realized in two steps:
- The person takes personal responsibility and recognizes that he or she is the co-creator of his or her own life.
- The inner decision to change something is made. The person opens himself to change.
These are the two developmental steps that the person implements by means of self-coaching, but at the same time they are gifts that the person grants to him/herself through self-coaching. These gifts consist of the healing power and the power to discover personal responsibility, as well as the willingness to change, grow and develop.
Prerequisites for self-coaching
- A realisticself-assessment
- Motivation and discipline, which can be found when you have a clear goal in mind
- Pleasure in self-reflection and in dealing with oneself
- Activation of the power of action and implementation
© Pavlo Vakhrushev – Fotolia
Implementation of self-coaching: the bridge to change
The metaphor of the bridge represents a guide for self-coaching. With its help, two positions can be identified: On the one hand, there is a beginning, that is, an actual state, and on the other hand, there is a goal, equivalent to a desired state. Self-coaching is generally a goal-open process.
The moment a self-coaching program is started and the work on a certain goal begins, one sets the first step on a path
After walking on that path for some time, the realization may mature that the bridge leads somewhere else. It may come up in the course of training that the desired goal is not quite suitable after all, and so it is reformulated as well as adjusted. The healing power of the bridge as a metaphor is that it very subtly suggests, “To get from one shore to the other, you must go step by step.” The bridge as a metaphor in itself illustrates the necessity of doing.
It is to be walked step by step, and although jumps are sometimes possible, the distance is to be covered from the beginning to the end. In addition, this metaphor also conveys that the person on the bridge sometimes pauses, looks back, takes a break, perhaps takes a step or two back, or sometimes even goes all the way back to the shore to finish something, and then continues on again. A bridge always illustrates a path that consists of different steps.
The 5 steps of self-coaching
In the context of Systemic Archetypal Numerology Coaching integrative solution focused coaching, self-coaching consists of 5 steps:
- Awareness of the desired change
- Definition of an “open” goal or a “provisional” vision
- Letting go of and reversing behavioral patterns that inhibit development
- “Flexible” definition of steps to achieve the goal and implement the vision
- Regular review of whether the set goal or the “provisional” vision are still coherent and possible redefinition of both aspects