The Context to Make Change
A Coaching Playbook
Three Phases Post-Pandemic
- Separation
- Liminal Learnings
- Renewal, Reinvigoration and Re-Invention
- Visioning the future; (part 1)
- Loving your life, career, or work (part 2)
Introduction:
As we have been emerging from one of the most disruptive times in our recent history and we have been faced with our world being turned upside down, and our lives are left with now having to answer the following questions:
- WHO AM I?
- WHY AM I HERE?
- WHAT DO I NOW DESIRE IN MY LIFE?
- WHAT DO I NOW BELIEVE OR NOT?
- WHAT AM I WILLING TO SAY NO TO NOW?
- WHAT AM I WILLING TO SAY YES TO NOW?
So are we second-guessing our current and future choices by creating space to inventory our lives? How have we coped with our sense of grief and loss? Are you wondering what’s next for you and what is going to be possible?
This process of making change by way of three phases will help you to awaken and jump-start a new way of re-imagining your life in a whole new way.
Are you ready to move beyond your usual state of being on cruise control or on autopilot and eventually wake up 10 years later and ask the question- How have I got here?
This process of deep reflection (being objective, open, and optimistic) requires a coaching process where I will be asking hard questions while guiding you as a compassionate guide.
Ultimately, this three-phase guided coaching process will assist you in your way to discover your story of the future, not feel alone, feel more hope, and see yourself and others in a different future, an inspiring one that you desire it to be.
There are three resources that you will require to enter this journey with me:
- you will need creativity to be able to playfully explore and wonder;
- you will need to practice self-care and self-kindness; and
- you will be required to be brave in order to leap forward.
The following document is a playbook for you to consider how to move between the three phases of your life. Interestingly, many of us believe that during our life we will face many unexpected events or shocks. They can create our future state. This occurs because these unexpected events can become fertile conditions for major life and professional changes by igniting a spark within us to reflect on our desires and our new priorities. That’s true and especially since we’ve been in a pandemic for the past two years, it has given us the time to think, rest and ruminate about our past and present state.
Let’s be clear, that’s only a good start.
We rely heavily on our thinking as a way for us to move forward. But there is evidence that this is far from sufficient. We rarely think our way into a new way of acting. Rather, we act our way into new ways of thinking and being. Many events in our lives disrupt our habitual routines. These events have the potential to catalyze real change within us.
Think about what these disruptions and dysregulations within ourselves have been, and how they may have given us a chance to experiment, to become our scientists to create and renew connections.
We know that we are constantly conducting ‘inner business’ all the time, asking the big existential questions about what makes us happy or content with our lives?
What are the strengths or gifts that we need to bring forward to make many of our very difficult choices, going forward?
What are some important questions that we need to ask? How do we consolidate our sense of our self, our real self and perhaps, our ideal self in the future? However, now the question must be, do we have a feasible alternative and will this materialize soon? Or, are we stuck in limbo between the old and new? Be careful! We may be confronting a real danger by getting sucked back into our former selves or simply being immobilized, frozen and not being able to move forward.
How do we stop falling into that trap? How can we progress towards the outcomes we want?
Based on what we’ve learned these past few years there is a potential for catalyzing these past year’s events when we actively engage with our three phases of life changes. From separation, liminal learning, and renewal and re-imagining an ideal life, where there is a possibility of deep and critical change in the ideal self that you may want to become.
1) Separation Phase
Let’s first talk about separation. It’s very much about the notion that we want to facilitate behavioural change. And it’s often based on suggesting that people who have found a new and different place to live, work, and connect with other people have had a better chance of making life changes that stick because what’s known as a habit, becomes more malleable.
This is where we separate from specific people and places that trigger our old habits and our old selves.
We know that change always starts from separation including when there’s an identity change, where we separate from ourselves and from everybody we knew previously. By doing this, it stops us from continuing to be grounded in our old identities, our old habits and our old thinking.
This ‘separation dynamic’ is really important. Perhaps there is an interesting bias that takes form in our organizational life. We are prone to a narcissistic and lazy bias. We are drawn spontaneously to and maintain contact with people who are similar to us. And when we get to know and like people who are close to us, this makes it easier for us to get to know and like them. We’re quite lazy and we don’t want change.
We want to stay where we are. It’s extremely comfortable and doesn’t require us to question anything about who we are and what is next for us in our lives.
However, during the pandemic and probably for many other reasons, especially in terms of people moving away from each other, we have been faced with having less physical proximity to each other.
This now requires us to mitigate the powerful similarities that these two biases create for us in our daily life. This is an important reason to have a degree of separation from the current network of relationships that define our former selves. And this is vital to the possibility of reinventing, renewing and re-imaging our ideal self.
There is evidence that the size of people’s networks shrank after the age of 60. That’s not because people have fewer opportunities to connect, but people at this age of 60 perceive time as limited and they become much more selective with whom and with what they spend their time contributing.
Perhaps the way we should think about this is to foster our reinvention and re-imagining ourselves. We need to encourage greater activity in how and with whom we spend our limited time. That is an outcome that will help us understand the future outcomes and current goals that we need to set for ourselves as we lean into this separation phase.
Focus Questions
The next two stages within this process (liminal Learning and re-imagining your future and your ideal self) are to be guided by a number of important questions and exercises that will assist to move from one stage to another. These questions will introduce to you a way to bring forward the four bits of intelligence that you possess, and will act as a framework of 4 lenses. This will bring forward an integrated approach to creating your ideal self. This process will create an opportunity to explore and describe your powerful vision of your future.
The questions will be provided in a guided compassionate coaching approach and are aligned with your four bits of intelligence of Cognition, Physical, Emotional and Spiritual forms.
The intention is to guide you so that you will have created and started a process to integrate your new vision of self and an approach to a future life that you will ‘LOVE”.
If you wish to know more about the two other phases and their parts of human change, please contact me.
