Emotional Wellbeing

Life Coaching traditionally doesn’t deal with your messy emotions, instead it helps you clarify your goals, change your thinking and beliefs and your actions. This behavioral approach, which is borrowed from CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) works for lots of people who are otherwise stuck in their heads, but unfortunately, what the industry is blind to, is that, even for those people it does work for, it’s not a long term fix.

It’s like trying to move your body across a room with just your head, your head and your thoughts are great, but it’s your whole body, your whole self that actually moves you forwards in your life. It’s the same with your life, having goals, taking control of your thoughts is hugely important but if you’re emotionally sabotaging, in pain, anxious or angry, with all the good will in the world, it’s not going to work.

You might have noticed that in almost all of the life coaching books, courses and training workshops, there’s a section on ‘imagining’ and ‘visualizing’ your ‘ideal future’, the problem with that is, it’s not vital that you are good at visualizing, or have a great imagination.

Many people who aren’t visual thinkers struggle and give up at this point, and believe that there’s either something wrong with them or that life coaching doesn’t work. But what the exercise is meant to help you do is, ‘Emotionally Identify’ with and get excited by the FEELING of that potential, ideal future. So it doesn’t matter if you can’t imagine, what you have to do instead is Feel, and if you can get excited and feel what it might be like to live the life you dream about, then you’re more than half way there to making it become a reality.

So if you want to move your life forwards, it’s vital that your emotions are not only involved but they are happy and excited by the prospects of you changing your life for the better.

The problem is that most of us are deeply emotionally wounded by life, and by the time we are adults we’ve been run over by heart break and punished by society so many times that our hearts are almost completely unavailable for the task of getting truly impassioned and feeling that we even deserve to be happy.

So if we truly want to move our lives forward, we are going to have to deal with our often whirling negative emotions, and heal our emotional scaring. The best, quickest and most powerful way to heal your heart is annoyingly simple.

The technique I’m going to share with you is very simple but for many it is also very difficult. And before you dismiss my suggestion, let me explain how it works on a deeper level.

Whether you’ve heard of ‘Inner Child Therapy’ or not, it’s easy to understand that we’re shaped by our early childhood experiences, traumas and identity. Often as children we where powerless to have any agency over our own lives. We probably didn’t have a perfect or ideal childhood and even if we think we did, often out inner child is still hurting from some either minor or major need for love not being met.

As adults we internalize elements of our parents, the things they taught us about life and about ourselves. But as adults now, there is no one else in our heads, we are merely replaying the voices or our parents. But as adult we also need to take responsibility for our own thoughts and the feelings they create within us.

In order to fundamentally change our lives we have to challenge the deepest held childhood beliefs, which limit, sabotage or hold us back from living a life that we can truly love.

This will take some time and even a bit of effort, but as I mentioned it’s a very simple technique that you can do anywhere as many times a day as you can until you notice and start to feel the deep shift that it will undoubtedly create in your heart and your life.

This emotional self healing exercise must been done every day, ideally in the morning and before you go to sleep. Closing your eyes and placing your hands on your heart, say to yourself “I am Safe and I am Loved”.

Repeat this like a mantra meditation over and over, for at least 20 minutes. You might notice that to start with this is really difficult, there might be voices within you that challenge or argue against this message. That’s okay, the voice of discontent is actually the voice of your ‘Inner Child’, she is probably very upset with your adult self.

But stay with it, even if at times the words seem meaningless, keep allowing yourself to say the words until the opposition calms down, and you begin to feel something mildly positive.

Eventually and with dedication and practice, this daily mantra meditation will seep into your conscious and unconscious mind and heart and you will start to actually feel a genuine love for your inner child and for your self.

This simple affirmation, heals your inner pain and suffering, your inner parental archetypes start working to help and support you, giving you unconditional love and support, your childhood scars slowly start to mend and heal themselves and you begin to truly feel that you deserve a happy and joyous life.