Most people ( me included ) have a tendency to proclaim that they are living their lives in a state of free choice. It is a nice feeling to experience, the idea we are all in control of ourselves and are making choices freely and without outside influence.
We can take a perspective that all your coaching clients are wrestling with and are constantly interacting with choices. We can apply the idea of choice points to almost anything. Shall I do my teeth before I wash my face or vice versa? Shall I have eggs or cereal for breakfast or something else? What to wear, who to call, what to watch, who to listen to what to read, so on and so on.
We are partly in such abundance of opportunities to choose because we don’t find circumstances forcing us to take an action that is really the only option. If you have very few food options and are hungry you will find it easier to eat.
Our minds, ever clever and cunning, are able to make habits out of our behaviours so that we can streamline our choice points and have them placed on a kind of autopilot. This frees up the mind to think. And what does the mind think about mostly? The future and the past. What's going to happen and what has happened. Mindfulness has somewhat spiked the habits of many people as it draws our attention to what is happening right now and so exposes us to the realisation that we are living moments of our lives on autopilot, like automatons.
But so what? Isn't it good to have habits that make navigating the simple processes of life easier? Well yes and no. The problem we have is that habits are ultimately the enemy of choice, true choice, and often stops us being aware of the present moment as opposed to being constantly in either the past or the future in our minds.
If we are to be useful coaches for people who, we must always remember, have a coach to support and facilitate behaviour change then one of our greatest uses is to assist them to wake up to their habits and the default choices that drive them.
Here are the three key things you can do in your coaching that will keep reflection about habits, choices and change alive in your coaching relationships.
Get the information.
Coach your clients to get the information about their lives in as much detail as possible. Ask them to keep notes of everything the do for an agreed period of time. Dig into detail. If you are working as a business coach then start with the workday. No detail is unimportant. In a coaching session help them get clear about how much of their lives is in autopilot and how much is not. Encourage exploration of how the habits formed, how choices are made and ask are the reasons still current?
Match the information with emotion
We often go on emotional autopilot too. This is, in part, because when we future project or past reflect we are recalling emotions into the present moment as opposed to generating present time emotions. When we take a good look at the autopilots in our life we can find that we don't feel necessarily so comfortable with them. This is especially true if they are in conflict with those meaningful aspects of our lives that can get sidelined by commitments.( see no 3 below) Aligning the emotional energy and fields with the behaviours often leads to a person gaining insight into how they are sometimes disconnected from how they feel. Habits can be used to manage and mask emotions, so knowing how that is playing out is vital for future choice.
3. Connect choice and habits to meaning.
Let's face it, people want deeply fulfilling lives. Their ability to deepen their life experience is related to their connection to meaning. Their choices either support connection to meaning or obscure it, sometimes even disconnecting them from it altogether. The same goes for habits. All behaviours need to make sense to the guiding objective of a person's life. If they don’t then we are faced with emptiness and depression, the sense that life is somewhat pointless.
Coach your clients to bring these habits and choices into the arena of meaning and purpose. It may not be comfortable for them as many of us shortchange ourselves in this way but the payoffs are huge.
Coaches are not immune to any of this either! We get onto autopilot as coaches, trotting out the same approaches and skills that we know work. That is okay to a point as long as we are not creating our own limiting circle of comfort that we are getting habituated with. Familiarity is a double edged experience producing both trust and intimacy and unconsciousness and sleepwalking through life, living in the past or future too much. Exploring this with our own coach is one way of keeping us alive to our work and the meaning behind it.