Coaching Fundamentals: How Do Thoughts Create Your Results?
Part of my job as a professional life coach is to educate and create awareness about what coaching is and how it impacts and improves lives. Afterall, “coaching” as a profession is relatively new compared to most other professional industries.
Before I became a professional coach, I was an elementary teacher, and one of my specialties is knowing how to explain and simplify intangible concepts so that they are more understandable.
One of the main fundamental concepts of coaching is that our thoughts create our results. You may have heard this concept, or you may have experienced it, but today I’d like to break it down and explain what it means, because it truly can make the difference between living an unexamined life where you feel like a powerless passenger vs. living life as an empowered creator of your destiny.
The basic concept is that what you think about and believe determines how you feel and how you feel determines the actions you take, therefore the actions you take affect the results of your life.
Here’s how it works, using a generic example.
Let’s say you are feeling unhappy in your current job and you want to find another opportunity. You feel stuck and can’t see any other options, and each year you start feeling more miserable and burned out. This situation takes a toll on your mental health, physical health, relationships and finances. This is a very common situation.
Now let’s break it down to show how thoughts create results.
Thought: I don’t have any other options. I’m stuck. I would have to go back to school and get another credential in order to get another job. It would be too hard to make the change.
These thoughts create your feelings about the situation:
Feelings: Hopeless, Stuck, Depressed, Unmotivated, Overwhelmed
Your feelings motivate your actions:
Actions: Numb with alcohol, food, or other distractions. Self-isolate. Take no action towards new path.
These actions create your results:
Result: Remain stuck and unhappy in your job.
This is just a general example that I made up based on very common scenarios.
But I have found that when you want to change something about your situation, you can start examining your thoughts.
Beliefs are just thoughts that have been engrained into your brain for a very long time. These beliefs shape who you think you are and what you think about the world and others.
I hope this was helpful. The next time you want to have a different result, examine your thoughts before you try to change your actions and you may uncover a surprising obstacle that has been blocking from the life you want.