What are you missing? October 1, 2014 – Posted in: Confidence, Personal Development – Tags: authenticity, bath magazine, coaching, confidence, fear, growth, Life Coach, Life Coaching, mindfulness, Personal Development, purpose
As a coach, it’s my job to help people achieve what they want in life by setting goals and overcoming obstacles. But what if the thing you really want is staring you in the face and you just haven’t seen it yet?
I have a client who very much wanted to be in love and settle down into a long-term relationship involving marriage and children. He’d had a couple of serious relationships in the past but they didn’t work out, so now he was on the hunt for Miss Right and had asked me to help with his confidence in finding her. After a couple of sessions he mentioned an amazing woman he’d met and really, really liked but told me that a relationship with her couldn’t work. His eyes lit up when he spoke about this woman and how he felt he’d connected with her on every level, so I started to dig. It turns out that the reason he felt she wasn’t right was because she already has two children from a previous relationship and this didn’t fit the picture of the ‘ideal’ woman in his mind.
We returned to the goal my client had set at the beginning of our work together involving the values and attributes the woman of his dreams would possess. It very quickly became clear to him that this woman he’d rejected because she had kids was perfect for him in every other way. He’d met her 3 months before, dated her a couple of times and then let her go because he was focussed on what a girlfriend ‘should be’ rather than just who she was. He kept saying he was ‘gutted’ about her because in every other way she was amazing. He’d dated other women since but no one even came close …
He left our session with a choice: to let go of his prescription for a great relationship, take a risk, reconnect with this woman and see where it took them, or to keep looking for Miss Right. He asked me what I’d do and, because coaching is non-directive, I couldn’t tell him. Maybe someone else’s children would be too big a stumbling block for him? Only he could know. But, with the benefit of hindsight (knowing how this eventually did turn out for him) I do know that life is often offering us profound happiness if we can just remove our blindfolds long enough to see it and grab it.
As for my client? He’s going for it!
This blog post first appeared as an article in my Life Column in The Bath Magazine.