Are You In Control? Or Are You Being Reactive?
Posted on July 28, 2020 by Deirdre Soraci, One of Thousands of Executive Coaches on Noomii.
Build new habits and the mental agility to change your own thinking
Are You In Control? Or Are You Being Reactive?
Growing up, I was a talker. I loved people, and I always wanted to interact. However, my natural exuberance was forever changed when my middle school teacher constantly sent reports home about how I could do so much better if I would just stop talking to other students during class. Eventually, I was sent to detention and had to write 100 times: “I shall endeavor to refrain from omitting any unnecessary oral communications.”
To this day, my subconscious mind sends an alarm when I am talking in groups. I become reactive in a pattern that does not serve me well. It wasn’t until I hired a coach that I even made this connection.Our past affects who we are today. There is no way around that. Where we can take back our power, is in doing “the work” to discover how and when we are being triggered. The practice of Mindfulness gets us closer to building our capacity to pause and choose how we want to react. In a nutshell, we gain a sense of space which allows us to be in choice. We can pause within the moment and see if we are in control of what we are trying to create, or are we falling into reactive tendencies.
How does coaching help you to find that space? It starts with a conversation where you describe the details of an event in which you felt triggered. You repeat this exercise with a number of such events. In session, you will describe and discuss details while your coach asks you questions that not only deepen your awareness but expand your perspective on other possibilities. You begin to look for situations where you might become reactive and deliberately place yourself in them, to explore the sensations and feelings and thinking patterns that arise.
You begin to build the habit of new thought, new ways of seeing what might or might not be. You learn to see what you used to turn away from. You see patterns going on in your life as you are able to pull back and distance yourself from what is actually happening. Your coach serves as a partner to help retrain your mind and set new neural pathways. Imagine your own personal trainer but we are working on excelling at mental pushups versus regular ones.
Coaching is hard work and it is a commitment. Sometimes you can truly feel that your brain is being twisted. The hard work has great rewards. What you could not see, becomes visible. In the heat of a moment where you may have felt triggered, you gain a sense of control. In a flash, you will see the moments where you may turn toward reactive tendencies. But you gain the power to change that.
Over time, you will build new habits and the mental agility to change your own thinking. This process is proven to build leadership agility, resilience and stretch to achieve the extraordinary results you want in your life.
Coaching works!
