In the lead up to the publication of The Concise Coaching Handbook, I’ll be using my blog to share excerpts. This is from the preface to part 1, on coaching yourself.
When you visit an expert for advice, you expect the expert to know more about the subject in question than you do.
You trust the expert to be able to assess your situation and to apply his or her specialized experience and information towards your situation.
If you are wise, you ask the wisest part of you, does this specialized information apply to my life in the way the expert says it does?
Will applying his or her recommendations improve this situation and my life?
If you are unclear, you may consult another expert to see if the next expert agrees with the first. Or you consult a third expert to see whether there is expert consensus.
Then you make a decision about whether to apply the advice.
An expert is someone who has or shows special skill or knowledge because of what s/he has been taught or what s/he has experienced.
In The Concise Coaching Handbook, I make a radical and potentially life-changing claim.
You are the expert on your life. You have special skill and knowledge about your life because of what you have experienced that no one else has. No one else knows more about your life, your life experiences or what will work for you or how to make your life work than you do.
This is not to say that you will never consult an expert about aspects of your life or about things you haven’t studied. Nor does it mean that you will never seek help or support. Seeking support is often a sign of strength.
But no one will ever know more about you than you know about yourself right now.
To completely own your expertise about your life, you need to know what your core strengths and values are. You need to know what makes you come alive. You need to know what your vision is for your life.
And then you need to claim your strengths, to acknowledge your values, and to create a vision…
And then you can act for yourself and on behalf of the world, bringing your strengths, values and vision to it.
No one else can be who you are or do exactly what you can do in the way you do it.
You need to trust and act on this fact.
You claim your expertise over your own life when you trust yourself and act on the information you give yourself.
Getting clear about your deepest, soul-level desires, learning to trust what the wisest part of you knows is true, and then acting on it, is the life purpose for most of us.
The Concise Coaching Handbook will show you some super-simple ways to clarify what you want. Trust the answers you give yourself. Act on them. Change your life. Change your world.
Above all, trust yourself.
I have never met a single person who doesn’t have worth, and who doesn’t have something to contribute by being in this world.
There’s an old joke:
“To be is to do.”—Sartre
“To do is to be.”—Camus
“Do be do be do.”—Sinatra
When you deeply ‘are’ who you are and ‘do’ what you came here to do, you create a melody where your being and your doing are so inextricably united that they are one and the same song.
And the joy you will experience in singing that song, will inspire the world.
May be pursue our paths, owning our own expertise about ourselves,
Best wishes,
Elizabeth
