How To Coach Yourself To Get What You Want in Life

(TLDR: Stop Focusing on What you Don’t Want!)

Key Highlights:

• We often define what we want by stating what we don’t want.

• What you don’t want is a great starting point, but it’s not going to get you to what you want.

• When you start to identify what you want, that’s when you’ll be able to start taking the steps to meet those goals.

“I just don’t want to be like my old boss.”

How many of us operate with a thought like this in the back of our minds?

Recently, I had a coaching session with a client who is the CEO of a small start-up. He had asked that we focus the session on how he was managing his staff.

For the majority of the session, we nudged around the issue, coming up with strategies but missing the bigger breakthrough.

Finally, I told my client, “I think we’re circling around something...something you don’t want to say. I think it’s limiting how far we can get with this issue.”

My client became silent, took a deep breath, and then finally said: “I just don’t want to be a jerk like my old boss.”

We both knew it was an important point because he immediately started laughing, and his entire demeanor changed.

Are you defining what you want by instead defining what you don’t want?

Remember, that is a perfectly acceptable starting point, but it’s not going to get you to where you want to be.

We often define what we want by stating what we don’t want, which is a reasonable place to start.

However, it is a far cry from actually getting what we want.

There are at least two reasons for this.

• First, defining what you don’t want doesn’t get you any closer to what you do want. You have to define what you actually want to get it. If I say I don’t want to go on vacation in the mountains, that is a starting point for picking a vacation but not a final destination. I can cross some places off the list, but until I define what I want for my vacation it's really hard to pick a specific place.

• The second reason that defining something by the negative doesn’t get you what you want is that it leaves your brain focused on exactly that...what you don’t want. When someone tells you “don’t think about elephants”, what is the first thing you think about? If I say “I don’t want to be like my old boss”, guess what my brain is thinking about? My old boss.

As I said before, defining what you don’t want is a perfectly reasonable place to start when figuring out what you do want, but it’s only a starting point. In order to get what you want, you need to create that for your brain to focus on.

For whatever reason, my client didn’t want to admit to me or himself that the reason he was struggling with managing his staff was that he was concerned about being a jerk like his old boss.

As long as that was lurking in the back of his brain, his brain couldn’t fully focus on becoming the boss he wanted to be. And while we had spent the bulk of the session talking about the kind of boss he wanted to be, once he acknowledged the real concern bothering him, the answer to the kind of boss he was going to become surfaced succinctly and with crystal clarity.

After we were both done laughing one word came to him that summed up the attribute that had been missing from our conversation, “Assertive.” His entire demeanor, tone of voice, and attitude shifted in a minute. His brain had something new to focus on that excited him and rang true for him.

Now, we had a new goal to focus on.

Are you defining what you want by defining what you don’t want?

Remember, that is a perfectly acceptable starting point, but it’s not going to get you to where you want to be.

Where do you want to be?

That’s the next question to ask yourself.

The more you define what you want, the more likely you are to be able to make that come to fruition. Here are a few more ways to coach yourself when your brain is a bit too focused on the negative.

DIRECTIONS: Fill in the blanks below with your own negative thoughts.

• If you don’t want ____________________, what do you want to have in your life?

• If you could wave a magic wand and ensure you will not have ____________________, what would you like to have instead?

• Imagine you could slowly decrease any chance of having ____________________ in your life, as it decreased what would you want to fill that space with?

• If you could look forward into the future where you are not ____________________, who would you be?

• If you don’t want ____________________, what would you prefer to have?

• If you could remove any possibility of ____________________, what would you want to replace it with?

And if these questions aren’t working, feel free to book a FREE introductory coaching session with me.