Melissa Walker of Heyday Coaching pens a monthly blog with tips for helping you achieve your own peak success, happiness, and vigor.
I ask new clients to complete a series of reflective questions before we begin our work together. Some questions are about the coaching relationship: “What approaches encourage or motivate you?” Others about the client’s life: “What are you proud of?” or “What has been your biggest disappointment?” or “If you could change one thing about your life so far, what would that be and why?”
One of the most important questions I ask is “What is your most common self-limiting behavior?”
Right now, I’m working with two clients who are on the verge of launching their own businesses. Both of them have carefully crafted business plans. Each is highly trained in her field and has spent years building a solid base of experience. Both have taken wise steps to lay the groundwork to enable them to hit the ground running. They’ve done their research, consulted trusted advisors, and organized their finances. They are eager and committed. They are ready. Yet both have recently said to me, “I’m afraid I’m making the wrong decision.”
Sometimes when a client is feeling stuck on a negative way of thinking about a situation or experience, I’ll ask, “How can you reframe that?”
When you reframe something, you look at events, emotions, and situation through a more positive lens. It’s not unlike what happens when you take a dingy albeit valuable landscape painting that you inherited from an elderly relative to a frame shop, and the craftspeople there transform it into a beautiful vista simply by putting it into a shiny new frame with a clean mat.
About two years ago, a client recommended Tara Mohr’s Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead (Avery, 2015). I immediately bought the book and added it to my bottomless to-be-read pile where it resided until last week. I should have retrieved it from the pile sooner, because it’s one of the best self-help books that I’ve read in a long time.
