Fearing That Hiring a Mental Skills Coach is a Sign of Weakness
There is an unfortunate stigma that prevents many people from gaining the benefits of mental skills coaching. It’s much more socially acceptable for someone to seek physical help than it is for them to seek mental help. However, it’s impossible to make permanent physical improvements if you don’t make mental improvements.
Unfortunately, to make this connection requires the mental skill of metacognition. But without a mental skills coach to help someone use metacognition techniques to change their thinking, money spent on developing physicals skills often goes to waste.
With that in mind, one of my favorite author’s and thought leaders Seth Godin provides a succinctly insightful essay to explain this complex paradox of coaching. He states:
It turns out that the people with the potential to benefit the most from a coach are often the most hesitant precisely because of what coaching involves.
Talking about our challenges. Setting goals. Acknowledging that we can get better. Eagerly seeking responsibility…
And yet we avert our eyes and hesitate. It might be because having a coach might be interpreted as a sign of weakness…
Self-awareness is a Superpower Not a Kryptonite
It’s that last statement from Godin that’s haunting for so many. Fearing that hiring a mental skills coach signals mental weakness becomes the barrier to improvement. But the fact is it signals the opposite. Having the self-awareness to hire a mental skills coach signals mental strength. Self-awareness is a superpower not a kryptonite.
Moreover, as Seth Godin reminds us in his essay:
At the top tier of just about any sort of endeavor, you’ll find that the performers have coaches.
With this in mind, making the choice to not hire a coach is making a choice to not be in the top tier. In fact, it’s also making the choice to not grow. Furthermore, as the old adage says, if you’re not growing, you’re dying. While I’m sure there are some who could argue the science of this statement, you would be a fool to argue the wisdom in it.
Unquestionably, you will not stay the same. Therefore, if you don’t have goals to get better you are conceding that your goal is to wither away.
So, at this point I’m going to assume withering away is not your goal. Instead, I’m going to assume your goal is to be a better person next year than this year. As a result, this means there is a gap between the person you are now and the person you want to be.
With that said, if you are starting to feel stagnant or worse don’t let fear stop you from acting. Now is the time to activate your mental skills to the best of your ability. There is no better feeling than the energy you get from mastering your thoughts, perceptions, emotions, values, and behaviors. As the famous maxim states so perfectly “the mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. “
Please contact me here and I will share specifics on how we can work together to get you started. It takes a concrete step by step plan to activate your mental skills so that you can be confident that your mind is serving you and not the other way around.