Embark on a transformative exploration with me, Sean, as we tackle the unseen emotional barriers that even the most accomplished leaders face. Together, we'll unravel real coaching sessions that lay bare the struggle against pessimism and feelings of hopelessness that secretly gnaw at one's resolve. By examining the insidious impact of words like 'ever' and 'never' on our challenges, this episode is a deep dive into how these simple terms can morph everyday hurdles into unscalable mountains. It's an intimate lesson on the necessity of self-awareness and the potent effects of self-coaching for personal and organizational advancement.
As we conclude our thought-provoking conversation, I leave you with a nugget of wisdom to ponder and apply. There's a calling to engage, subscribe, like, or even dislike, as your participation doesn't just enrich our community—it propels these vital conversations into the lives of those who stand to gain from them. Whether these insights strike a chord with you or offer a new perspective, your interaction is the thread that weaves our community's fabric, helping us extend our reach and impact.
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
Embark on a transformative exploration with me, Sean, as we tackle the unseen emotional barriers that even the most accomplished leaders face. Together, we'll unravel real coaching sessions that lay bare the struggle against pessimism and feelings of hopelessness that secretly gnaw at one's resolve. By examining the insidious impact of words like 'ever' and 'never' on our challenges, this episode is a deep dive into how these simple terms can morph everyday hurdles into unscalable mountains. It's an intimate lesson on the necessity of self-awareness and the potent effects of self-coaching for personal and organizational advancement.
As we conclude our thought-provoking conversation, I leave you with a nugget of wisdom to ponder and apply. There's a calling to engage, subscribe, like, or even dislike, as your participation doesn't just enrich our community—it propels these vital conversations into the lives of those who stand to gain from them. Whether these insights strike a chord with you or offer a new perspective, your interaction is the thread that weaves our community's fabric, helping us extend our reach and impact.
Are you an executive, entrepreneur, or combat veteran looking to overcome subconscious blind spots and limiting messaging to unlock your highest performance? Feel free to reach out to Sean at Reload Coaching and Consulting.
Welcome to the reload, where we help unconventional leaders craft the life they truly want by questioning the assumptions they have about how life works. My name is Sean and I'll be your host on this journey. As a performance coach and special operations combat veteran, I help high performing executives kick ass in their careers while connecting with deeply powerful insights that fuel their lives. Hello and welcome. For today I thought yeah, I thought we would end up digging into something that has come up in a couple coaching conversations that I've had recently. And, for those of you who are new to the show, the people that I tend to coach are corporate executives, occasionally some entrepreneurs who I guess we could argue are still connected with a corporate structure, and then military special operations combat veterans, because for the most part, that represents my background. Now, a couple of the conversations I've had recently have come out during teaching not coaching teaching a particular mental model that I use with individuals so that they, in turn, can self coach. Part of my goal in working with individuals is for them to be able to coach themselves. It's not going to be quite the same, but I like to think that people can get yeah, people can get pretty far down the road on their own and, as counterintuitive as it might be to earning revenue, I actually do want people to be able to be self-sufficient as much as possible and then to, once they're past that initial coaching engagement whether it's with me or with somebody else to be able to choose their next coach more from the perspective of a level up than it is from a perspective of dependence. Now, plenty of my coaching colleagues might disagree. Who knows? It's not my place, but this is how I like to run my business. Now in conducting this exercise, a couple of the conversations that I've had recently have brought out feelings of despair, feelings of hopelessness and pessimism. And, to address the elephant in the room, typically the type of person that I work with isn't engaged in that emotion. That does not mean that they don't ever engage in that emotion, and I thought it would be useful for us to spend a little bit of time talking about that, because there's a really corrosive effect of pessimism, despair, hopelessness that if you don't bring it under control quickly or you don't process the underlying instigator of those feelings and we don't really get a firm understanding of where is this coming from, why are you connected to this right now? Well then that corrosive effect can start to spread into your organization and that can have some pretty powerful consequences.
Speaker 1:Most of my clients really truly want to be good strategic partners with their customers. Most of my clients, for whatever reason, have businesses where long-term relationships are the norm, and I don't know about other coaches. Maybe other coaches have a different type of clientele but that's the type of clientele that I've noticed over time. I tend to work with that. There is this orientation to the possibility at least for a long-term relationship. Whether that's because there are a limited number of players in the space or what have you, that tends to be what is going on, and so most of my clients really truly want to be good strategic partners. Additionally, my clients tend to be the types of individuals who want to be both personally, professionally and organizationally, making progress. They want to improve. Now, what brought them to my doorstep in the first place might be more of a problem-solving orientation, like I've got a problem and not quite so much I want to go from good to great, but in either case, making progress and making improvement is something that they are deeply invested in.
Speaker 1:Now, if we look at this type of person and a couple of the conversations that I've had recently, a couple of comments that have come out that caused me to think about. You know, I should probably spit this onto the microphone and let people think about it for themselves. And how does this show up in their own life? One comment was I can't be a strategic partner. And what I want you to do momentarily here is to imagine a set of brackets and that we inject the word ever so instead of I can't be a strategic partner, it turns into I can't bracket ever close, bracket be a strategic partner.
Speaker 1:And this is really where that sense of pessimism, despair, hopelessness comes forward. And before we go any further, let's go ahead and consult yield dictionary. So when we see the word hopelessness, we see having no expectation of good or success, not susceptible to remedy or cure, incapable of redemption or improvement, giving no reason to expect good or success, incapable of solution, management or accomplishment. When we see despair to lose all hope, to become excuse me to be overcome by a sense of futility or defeat and with pessimism this was probably the most interesting for me an inclination to emphasize adverse aspects, conditions or possibilities or to expect the worst possible outcome. And then the second the doctrine that reality is essentially evil, the doctrine that evil overbalances happiness in life. That was that probably was the piece that captured my attention the most. Now, is it important whether you believe in good or evil? I don't think so, but more looking at these different definitions is trying to help us understand where is it that we in the world are not? Where is it that we engage in a sensation that bad outcomes are unavoidable? Where is it that we engage in a sensation that this cannot be fixed or cured or improved?
Speaker 1:Another one of the statements that was made by one of my clients is we aren't making progress. And what's interesting when we look at it through the lens of hopelessness, pessimism, is that we begin to see that it's not simply that statement of we are not making progress which is actually can be factually accurate, but what is being unconsciously injected into the statement that the client is not recognizing because they're currently connected to sort of a depressive sense of pessimism, hopelessness, despair, et cetera, is, instead of it being we are not making progress, it's we will never make progress. That is the emotional undercurrent, that is the inference that is happening on an unconscious level, that is actually lending more weight to the sense of feeling defeated and oftentimes in those moments when clients are feeling defeated and just recently I had to politely and nicely get into a client's ass because he was talking about how a leopard can't change its spots because he had a bit of a regressive moment in a conversation with somebody and he acted in a way that he wasn't proud of and he was down on himself. And so it was my place as his coach to gently step in there and say hey, pull your head out of your ass, you are better than this, not in the sense of you shouldn't have misstep or you shouldn't have regressed, but in the sense that he was being defeatist. He was really sort of honing in on, homing in on excuse me, this display that he was not proud of and thinking that all the progress that he's made over the last several months of which others have made note, but none of that was a real thing that none of it counts because there was a moment of regression. And so for you, dear listener, there is something that you've been seeking to improve upon and it doesn't feel like you've made progress. Evaluate. Why is that? Is it because you had a moment of setback? Is it because you're just not accelerating as fast as you think you should, because neither of those invalidate the progress that you're making. And so perhaps this is you know me, on a wider level being of service, saying hey, pull your head out of your ass. You're better than this. And by better it doesn't mean that humans are not allowed to have missteps, that they're not allowed to have moments of regression.
Speaker 1:When I say that you're better than this, what I mean is that we want to pull you out of your defeatist pessimism. We want to reconnect you with a deeper understanding that you have been making progress. Now, if you genuinely have set yourself a certain goal, a certain target, and, in true objectivity, you recognize that you've not been putting the work in to make progress, okay, fair. Well then, see where you're not making progress and begin to put the effort in. Whether that's a physical, tangible goal, or whether that's more of a how do I carry myself in the world or what is the attitude that I take in my day to day affairs. Perhaps it's a relational goal, in terms of how you treat somebody else or treat others in general, or perhaps it's an inward relation when are you too harsh and cruel to yourself? In either case, if you genuinely, objectively, have not been making progress, that's fine, that's fine. Note where you're not making the effort and put the effort in If there's a belief that standing in the way, get clear on what that obstruction is and look at it really deeply, look at it and grapple with the significance of it.
Speaker 1:Are you actually maybe connected to a sense of pessimism, a sense of hopelessness, a sense of despair that it's futile? We so often convince ourselves that something is futile because we downgrade the potential reward of the change we are attempting to make. Why? Because change is hard. That's why, so frequently, that expression the juice had better be worth the squeeze can be such a wonderfully appropriate and juicy expression. To be clear about what is the benefit of the change that you are attempting to make, so that when the effort shows up, the pinch, the struggle shows up, that you are clear in your mind. Okay, yes, this is why I'm doing this, this is why I'm going through the hard work, this is why I'm facing the discomfort and if you're one of my clients listening to this and many of my clients do this is the process right. You are facing difficult things. Sessions with your dear coach are not always easy, because we're looking at elements that are can be excuse me deeply transformative.
Speaker 1:And in that process of transformation, very frequently the old way has to die and that tends to come with, at the very least, a lot of pain, and quite often also tackled in with there is a lot of suffering. Pain and suffering are different things, but we often stack suffering on top of pain, which is also part of the process of opening our awareness. Where is it that we are creating suffering? And I would say that if we are tapping into a sense of despair, a sense of pessimism that we have unknowingly been adding in a fair amount of suffering narrative, we look back at the client that was talking about a leopard not being able to change its spots because he acted in a way that he wasn't proud of. He's engaging in a suffering narrative that, oh gosh, well, this will never get better. I don't have it in me. I can't really change myself when, in reality, the 360 that was done for him, there were people that actually explicitly commented on being impressed how he has been able to change himself. So we engage in these poor me suffering narratives, and I do it too, hopefully, if I mean, if this is your only exposure to the show.
Speaker 1:Well, but hopefully, even in this show, you can recognize that I am not trying to come from some holier than now place. I am not the coach who is out there saying, oh, I've got it all figured out, follow me. I am the person who, most of the time if you were to ask my friends and my wife and my family, I'm sure that they would point out areas where I fall down on this but most of the time I am the individual who attempts to look at things, who attempts to be curious and willing to put myself in the harms way of perhaps doubting whether I have the answer or whether I'm doing things the right way or whether I'm the good person that I think I am or would hope to be. It's not that we need to have the answer all the time. Is it nice to have the answer occasionally or most of the time? Yeah, probably.
Speaker 1:But for us to be willing to acknowledge when we don't have the answer, for us to be willing to acknowledge that, okay, I'm not going to be 100% If I act in a way that causes me to feel guilt or shame because I've regressed on the progress that I've been trying to make in a certain endeavor, take it on board, face it, keep your eyes open, look really deeply, look at what happened in that instance and then also begin to recognize where you are adopting this suffering, poor me, self-defeatest attitude.
Speaker 1:And then, if you are a leader and I would actually argue and thanks to my coaching institute for helping to drive this one home you're a leader, whether you have the title for it or not, because even if you are quote unquote only an individual contributor, the way that you show up to work, the way that you show up to your family, the way that you show up to the people in your life, has an impact. Now, it's quite likely fair to say that if somebody's title is president or CEO or you know some formal leadership title, that that effect is simply magnified and intensified, at least inside of an organization. But there are plenty of individuals that have no high rank on their business card and yet have tremendous influence in the organization because of the charisma that they bring, their ability to magnetize people to them, because of how they make people feel or potentially because of their technical expertise, even if their rank is relatively low. So people sit up and take notice and so, regardless of whether you have the title for it or not, I would say you are in a position of leadership and that the thing to bear in mind is how are you leading others when you are connected to a sense of despair, pessimism, suffering, and what would you like to change about that?
Speaker 1:Okay, that's it for today. Hopefully this was short and punchy for you and hopefully it was useful. I would love it if you would like subscribe, hit the smash button of likes or dislikes or I don't know whatever technological stuff, and share it with people that you think would benefit or don't. It's totally up to you. Until next time, take care of each other.