Toward a Self-Talk Manual for Coaches and Coachees

TOWARD A SELF-TALK MANUAL FOR COACHES AND COACHEES
Hyacinth E. Gooden-Bailey,M.A.
copyright(c)2008

Both Coaches and their clients need to do some healthy self-talking each day. I discovered the general value of self-talk as a girl going to school and preparing for examinations. I confirmed the psychological and philosophical values of this as an adult. Now as a coach years later, the first page I envisioned for my website was titled: Self-Coaching Tips. The idea sprung out of me automatically. This is not contrary to our coaching template, since we do indeed insist that the client is wholesome, resourceful and knows best.

Self-talk is a necessary component of self-management and self-management is a necessary component of being a coach and of being a coaching client. The coach has to manage emotions, feelings, reactions, pattern of speech, pace of speech and the relationship between herself and each individual client or group of clients. The coachee has to self-manage the boundaries between himself and his coach, his choice of agendas and his accountability for actions taken as a result of coaching. Let’s look further at each side of the coin, for the Coach and for the client and then I will share a helping tool for reminding you if you have missed your daily dose of self-talk. Now remember, if you talk out loud in the presence of others, it’s called madness. I have done it that way myself all my life.

I am also a believer in the Habbukuk advice – writing it and making it plain – whatever your thoughts, objectives, goals and visions are. So combining both you have a powerful tool for influencing your mind to influence your brain to influence your actions and outcomes.

Sometimes I write and self-talk and when the outcomes happen and I look back I am not sure whether I am looking at a record of what happened or my projection of what I wanted to happen. They could be one and the same anyway. So be careful to date your written-talk, since you can’t depend on your memory to do that. As a coach you can self-talk a number of things, of course with a good dose of imagination, as well as of spiritual vibrations, which we will not get into now.

1. your first coaching session ( for new coaches)
2. your first big-paying client encounter when you ask for the fees you deserve
3. your first group coaching session in the library hall
4. your next Tele-class session when 100 persons have signed up
5. your next meeting with that Executive who is skeptical about coaching

In your self-talk and imagining you already have the positive results under your belt, so why would you go back over it and rehash fear and doubt? If you are tempted to do that, rehearse the scenes again as if in replay or ask your own coach to walk you through it the way you saw it all playing out.

For the Coaching Client

Overcome your fear and self-judgment by mentally rehearsing and then airing the scenario you feel so ‘weak’ about with your coach:
• the truth about why you don’t want to change jobs
• what you will really say at your next job interview
• the steps you know you must take to get your
business started in six months
• how you will begin to behave to manage conflict
in your office
• how you will plan and stick to your plans to save money

It is obvious that for every challenge, obstacle, and threat, there are scenarios within our reach to select, to determine the outcome we choose and that no outcome is a ‘done deal’. The time and energy we project making the feared outcome so real that it stifles and depresses us, is the same time and energy we can use in self-talk, writing our reality into production and in mentally rehearsing the better and more ideal outcomes. Coaches and clients can work on this and each will support the achievement and satisfaction they are envisaging in their immediate futures.

The manual you develop will be based on your own experience with self-talk replacing self-doubt and chronic ‘I can’t see that happening’.

Here is a chart. If you are tired of charts, get rid of the others and use this one. THE SELF-TALK MONITORING AND MOTIVATION CHART

Monday:
Spiritual self-talk -for cleansing and focus
Tuesday:
Imagining the highest and best – for creativity
Wednesday:
Intellectual self-talk – for ability to be logical and to deliver
Thursday:
Action self-talk – for get-up-and-go steps and energy
Friday:
Fun and joy self-talk – to raise level of happiness
Choose the topic to work on based on the current scenario in your life situation.

You could make a seven-day chart but this is just an example. What else could you add to this on Saturday and Sunday? Maybe, do a review and make remarks about how great this is turning out. By the end of a few months, you will have made your own tool to keep on track and to keep talking powerfully to yourself every day, because you know that you have done it before and that it works.

A number of theories as well as established facts in neuroscience are increasingly supporting the idea of not only the influence of mind over matter, but that mind and matter may be one and the same, in the sense that the brain is influenced by our thoughts and that it flexes at our command (our unflinching focus). To take it further, it is supported too that objective reality is under our own influence as we observe it. As if we are not yet confused, the sum total is that space and time and future reality are all intertwined. Befuddling and enlightening is what it is, at the same time, but with great implications for how we look at what can and cannot be. We will delve into these matters further at another time.

Let me know how powerful you have become talking to yourself.

Hyacinth E. Gooden-Bailey, M.A. is a certified Life Transitions Coach (specializing in professional women at mid-career, pre-retirees, career-changers & baby boomers) and Cross-Cultural Dynamics Strategist, writer of poetry, short stories and novels, and is working on a text on the subject of Cross Cultural Dynamics in Coaching. Readers may contact her at heb@sapiencecoaching.com, and register for her weekly tele-classes and free monthly eZines.