How life coaching can lead to better family relationship

Posted on November 19, 2016 by Tania Venn, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

The first time I experienced family problems that threatened to create significant and irreparable damage to my family life, I got myself over to a therapist. I have profound gratitude for the therapists who have supported me through some pretty dark places. The common denominator with every experience? I got to do a lot of the deep internal digging that revealed my role in whatever discord was currently playing out. Some of that searching involved long-buried, painful memories from the past. We need this type of therapy from time to time. But there are other times when we’d rather set a baseline and heal forward to effect rapid, lasting change. Enter, life coaching.

Life coaching has become very popular these days and for a good reason. Partnering with a skilled life coach can bring about a remarkable change in a short period. I call life coaching a partnership because it takes the life coach and the client, both working well together, for results to be favorable. Here’s how I’d break this partnership down.

The life coach’s part is to guide you to access your creativity and resourcefulness through positive, non-judgemental conversation.

Your part is to be open to the process, trust the process, and work willingly with your coach.

Voila! You’re off to a great start!

Now let’s take this partnership one layer deeper to see how this life coaching process works.

When people seek out a life coach, it’s because they are stuck in some area of their life. It could be family relationship, love or primary relationship, friendship, career transition, spirituality, or health and wellness. One of the most common areas of stuckness is the family relationship. My life coaching practice focuses on empty nest and creating what I call a MoreBetter life, and family relationship plays heavily into this field of interest, so let’s use it as our example.

In this scenario, you have a sister, and you love your sister, but you fight like crazy, and it’s usually over deep-rooted family-of-origin issues that you each view differently. You want to resolve the problem because at every family gathering there is some tension and increasingly, you don’t even want to get together anymore. The problem is, everytime you think of taking that step toward resolution, you get so incredibly angry and a swirl of emotions bubble up to a seething point. YOU ARE STUCK.

You are stuck because the emotion you are feeling is overwhelming and incapacitates you from taking action to do something about the problem. So if you could eradicate the emotion, couldn’t you then eliminate the stuckness?

Developmental psychologists have linked emotion and thought for a long time now; many even believing that by school age, the two are fully integrated.

When we are experiencing heavy emotions in the midst of a family drama, we usually think our emotions are triggered by an inappropriate comment or an unwelcome attack. But it’s not the “thing” that is said or done. It’s our “thoughts” about the “thing” that creates our emotion.

And lucky for us, we can control our thoughts. Yes, we can.

The first step in controlling our thoughts is to realize that we are not our thoughts. Considering our physical and genuine selves, including our minds, as separate from the thoughts that enter our minds, is the first step. When we separate what our minds are thinking from our pure mind itself – our essence, if you will – then we can see those thoughts from a distance and contemplate their worthiness.

Now here is where life coaching steps in. Life coaches are trained to understand all of this stuff. Here’s a ridiculously simple demonstration of how this family issue might fall apart for you:

Coach: What emotion do you feel when you experience these blow-ups with your sister?
Client: I’m angry all the time at her.
Coach: Are you experiencing any other emotions at this time?
Client: I’m also very hurt. Hurt and angry.
Coach: What are you thinking when you feel hurt?
Client: She got all of the attention when we were growing up, not me.
Coach: Are you thinking anything else?
Client: She did bad things to get attention.
Coach: And those two thoughts lead to feelings of anger and hurt?
Client: Yes.
Coach: What emotions would you like to feel when you think of your sister?
Client: Happiness and love.
Coach: Do you feel those sometimes?
Client: Not really.
Coach: Do you love your sister?
Client: Yes.
Coach: Why do you think you don’t feel the emotions of love and happiness?
Client: Because I’m always thinking of how unfair it was that she got the attention.
Coach: And what would happen if you stopped thinking that?

This informal dialogue shows a typical pattern that people with family relationship issues exhibit. They all have a story – containing beliefs about how people should behave or how situations should be played out – that is holding them back in life.

In life coaching, we guide you to drawing out these blocks and discovering for yourself new ways of thinking about them going forward. Then we provide you with a chest of tools to utilize and practice with that will ultimately result in enduring change. This is the brain work.

It is common knowledge now that the human brain exhibits plasticity; that is it can re-wire itself. A simple example is when you are learning a new language. At first, it’s tough. That’s because your brain has no reference for this, but over time, as you continue learning the language, your brain’s synapses will rework to grow a familiarity with the new information. You’ve probably also heard that your brain believes anything you tell it; whether what you tell it is true or not.

So, all you have to do is retrain your thoughts around your sister woes by replacing the negative ones with more positive ones. A coach would likely ask our fictitious client to identify at least one experience of love and one of happiness, relating to her sister. She would then guide the client to visualizing these experiences and replacing the old, negative recollections with the new, positive ones.

Yes, it’s work, but the majority of life coaching clients believe it’s work that changes lives for the better.

The interesting difference then between many traditional modes of change therapy and life coaching is that with life coaching you can set a baseline for the day you strike that partnership with a coach. That benchmark takes you forward; you heal forward rather than backward, then forward.

Life coaching can save a lot of time, money, and painful work by taking you, from this day forward to your greatest life ever.