During the first few sessions of a coaching engagement, my client and I, we try our best to get clear on their desired outcome, a subjective or objective way to measure progress towards that outcome, and the heaviest belief that’s keeping them from that desire.
When we land on this heaviest belief, I might say something like, “On a scale of one to ten, with one being I don’t trust myself one bit and ten being I trust myself so darn much, where does your current belief land?” Once they pick a number, I’ll have them describe that number in a sentence.
Then, I tell them that it’s not in their nervous system’s best interest to try to move from their number to a ten directly. It can scare off the nervous system and have us collapse into inaction. Or we might be able to hustle and muscle our way into a ten, albeit a very short-lived ten. This is not how I work.
I ask them if we were to move their number towards ten, but by just one digit, what does that new, believable but slightly uncomfortable belief sound like? I sometimes give options to get them going: I’m willing to trust myself a bit more, I want to trust myself more, I can trust myself more, what would happen if I trust myself more?
All our beliefs are situated on temporary bus stops in a spectrum like this. They shift and shimmer all the time. We may get off in one stop in career matters and another faraway stop in relationship land. Such is life. Such is also like and love.
I used to think that love and like were binary. You either liked someone or did not. If you loved me, you would have changed. If you really liked me, you would want to see me more often. If you really loved me, you wouldn’t belittle my dreams.
What this thinking had me do was whenever someone liked me more than 50%, I jumped into that relationship, whether it was a romantic relationship or a friendship. I behaved like I was living proof of licking love off of knife edges, as the poet Lauren Eden beautifully said.
What I didn’t realize was that we all deserve the liking and the loving to be 100%, not just when they thought they could coax us into bed, but also when we were plagued by insecurity, especially then.
But the world is most definitely a ball of freewill. No one has to put up with my unmet needs from childhood, but neither do I have to stay, hoping for the like and the love to grow into 100%. Or more.
