Let’s Play Jenga
&
Change Your Life
(Photo by Saurav S on Unsplash)
I love to help people change their lives.
It’s the most rewarding thing I do.
One of the best ways to explain life coaching is to use the Jenga example.
You’ve seen or played Jenga, right?
The game with the tower of blocks.
You take turns pulling out the blocks, and eventually, the whole thing falls over.
Well, that’s what I do to help people change their lives.
Explaining how Jenga is just like the beliefs you have that create your results is the perfect way to illustrate what coaching together is going to be like.
Being able to conceptualize what the plan is to create the change clients want makes executing it and following through so much easier.
I’ve always found that I do things better when I understand why I’m doing them.
Knowing how each piece fits increases my focus and desire to perform to the best of my ability.
Understanding where you are at the start, the path you’re going to take, and the final destination always makes the journey easier.
(Photo by Taras Zaluzhnyi on Unsplash)
This is what the life coaching journey looks like.
We begin by developing an understanding of how every feeling, action, and result starts with a thought we choose.
Next comes the realization that because every thought is in our control, so is every feeling, action, and result.
The only way to change our feelings, actions, and results is to choose new thoughts.
Thoughts we choose repeatedly become beliefs.
These beliefs aren’t facts.
They are our interpretations or opinions of facts.
Now, it usually doesn’t feel that way to us, but it’s true.
The first time I got coached, it didn’t feel that way to me either.
We all have a tendency to believe the thoughts we keep choosing are actually facts when they aren’t.
We take each thought, repeat it, and stack it on the next one…
Until we build a tower of beliefs that keeps us stuck where we are.
In order to create the change we want, we don’t have to challenge and change every thought we have in our Jenga tower of beliefs.
We can topple the whole thing over by removing or changing a few key blocks.
(Photo by Valery Fedotov on Unsplash)
The fun part is trying to figure out what those key thoughts are, why we chose them, and what else we can think and believe instead.
It can be a process that creates the change and topples the tower over in just a matter of minutes…
But it usually takes a little longer.
We have a tendency to want to protect and defend our thoughts and beliefs.
We try to justify and argue for our beliefs even when we can see they aren’t producing the things we want.
Change is scary.
It’s new.
And our primitive brains don’t like new things.
The best way to defeat our primitive brains is through logical, deliberate thinking.
And that’s where a coach can help the most.
Along with explaining these concepts, a coach can help us challenge and change our thoughts.
The first step for a coach is to help identify the thoughts we’re choosing that are creating the things we don’t want.
You can’t change something if you aren’t aware of what that something is.
Most of the time, these thoughts are very hard for us to see on our own.
They disguise themselves as those factual truths that can’t be changed.
But a coach is an expert at pointing out when we crossed the line that separates the factual circumstances from the thoughts we choose about those facts.
And then a coach is an expert at helping us move from where we are in small, believable thought steps to where we want to be.
We can choose to think differently.
We have the freedom to choose to think what we want no matter the circumstance.
Eventually, we all have a choice to make.
We can keep thinking the same thoughts.
We can hold onto our beliefs.
And we can stay where we are.
Or we can choose new thoughts.
We can replace our old beliefs with new ones.
We can create a new tower and a new life.
We can build an entirely new cityscape of empowering towers of belief.
The choice is yours.
Come join me.
I’d love to play a game of Jenga with you.