About life coaching…
Living the life we want is not always as beautiful as angels singing but not having the courage to try means either we are not sure what exactly we want or we care too much about how people think about us. There are no easy ways to make changes to our lives and that’s probably why life coaching comes into being in the first place. In many occasions, people just cannot do it on their own because we are or at least we believe we are vulnerable to all kinds of disruptions, from as tiny as eating less and exercising more, to as big as quitting jobs or embarking a lifelong journey with someone.
A man is only as great as his ambition. We need to find out how our dream life is like first. Below are some steps that can be helpful to this miraculous discovery process.
- Firstly, really picture your dream life and try immerse yourselves in a similar real-life environment. You can read more stories of people who are living such lives already, shadowing them or even doing by yourself.
- Secondly, ask yourselves the following questions. Are you excited about living the life you just pictured? Do you like the people and nature of activities in this setting? Do you feel comfortable with your dream life? Do you believe you would enjoy it for at least 3–5 years?
- Thirdly, listen to yourself and don’t resist your authentic thoughts. They are precious data points that shouldn’t be ignored or manipulated. Summarise your likes and dislikes.
- Fourthly, redo step 1–3 after a period of time when you are in the right mood again. Don’t rush.
- Lastly, list out all the REAL likes and REAL dislikes and brainstorm the optimal life that has the most REAL likes and least REAL dislikes. Sometimes, you may not have a certain answer right away as there are way too many possibilities of life that we have no idea about at present. As long as we keep them in mind, we can at least tell whether something is close or far from our dream life when someone talks about it randomly next time.
Once we form a picture of our dream life that is clear enough for us to think about how to achieve it, we will need to learn to enable us to move forward. What we need for this journey is a little bit of idealism and perseverance. We all have our comfort levels and we should not go beyond them too far. We always overestimate two things, our chance of success before we try and the difficulty of achieving the goal after we encounter a few setbacks. Hence, low hanging fruits are good starting points. We shouldn’t expect we can achieve our dream life overnight otherwise most of the people should already be doing that by definition, so start with something small and build a habit of pursuit. The power of inertia can be smartly used to help us alleviate the pains and doubts before we taste the sense of achievement once ina while. Don’t be afraid of letting ourselves fall as we just need to bring ourselves back on track quickly when something goes wrong.
When we look back, the path of pursuit of dream life we go down would look very much like solving a maze. Even though we go back and forth or even in opposite direction sometimes, we won’t be able to live the life we want in absence of such imperfection. We should stay mentally strong as we have to live with loneliness and frustration on this lifelong journey. Sports, meditations andeven banking jobs (!) are good ways to enhance our mental power. Be gratefulfor the challenging experience we had as those days and people made us who we are today.
Treasure all the happy and challenging moments as being grateful itself is the best part of our lives.
