There is a paradoxical thing going on with people in the people business. I’m talking about you: coaches, teachers, healers, therapists, social workers, lawyers…
More often than not, you have chosen your profession because you feel you have something to offer to humanity. You have learnt an important lesson in life, or you have an invaluable skill, that you are dying to share with the people who can benefit from it.
Usually, this is also your biggest trap. Because you have this knowledge, this skill, this experience, and this urge to save the world, you easily fall into the trap of needing to be the expert, needing to have all the answers, and needing to have the power to literally save the world.
And of course you don’t. You’re still only human. With the same human brain that can so easily go into survival mode when fear strikes.
And fear will strike.
When?
Well, whenever you are most vulnerable.
In other words, in situations where you feel you need to know, you need to be the expert, you have to have the solution, you need to save… and you can’t. Because this is a problem you’ve never encountered before. Or a problem that is too close to home, and you haven’t reached the full depths of it yourself yet.
Those are the moments when you feel like a fraud, an imposter. Because how could you presume to be able to help others, when you can’t even seem to help yourself? When you get so stressed, so fearful, so helpless?
And you know what? The more you feel you need to help, to know, to solve… the less you can.
Because this is your sign that your brain is going in survival mode. And in survival mode, your mind is small, cramped.
Coaching, counselling, training, teaching, healing – they’re not about solving.
You don’t have to solve anything.
Life is not a problem to be solved. Life is an experience to be had.
It is exactly our survival-driven habit to see things as a problem to be solved, that causes most of our suffering.
What you’re good at, is to teach people how to surf the waves of their experience. How to be curious, how to stay present, how to nurture self-compassion. How to deepen their self-knowledge, how to explore their inner world. How to understand their own growth and learning processes so that they don’t have to be so lost at this experience called life.
And this is what all or us are continually learning over and over again, because survival mode and fear-based fight/flight and problem solving are always around the corner, waiting to overrule our wisdom.
Never mind.
Take a dose of your own medicine. Be curious and compassionate about your own experience. Be present and mindful.
Still, if you feel you’re running on empty in the people business, don’t keep struggling. Give me a call and let’s see how we can get you back in the flow.
You can book your free call here:
