DO WHAT YOU LOVE

EP #16

 

“Do I need a life coach?” You’re listening to Episode 16, with Rhiannon Bush

 

Welcome to the Do I need a life coach? Podcast. We’re here to discuss the ins- and outs- of the life coaching industry and give you tools to use, to see for yourself. I’m your host, Rhiannon Bush. Mother, management consultant and a passionate, certified life coach.

 

I was brought up to believe I could do anything, be anything and that the world was my oyster. And I truly believed it until I tried things and failed over and over again. I had horses, I fell off and had more concussions than was good for me. Went to musical theatre school for the love of music and the arts that I had, also in the hopes of making it a career and I’m so glad I tried, turns out it was also not something I was destined for. I feel like I’ve been pretty mediocre at things my entire life, despite trying really really hard and most of the time, that’s ok, I’ve had a real crack but something I didn’t appreciate until very recently, too recently, was the fact that not everything should be done with the aim of being good at it, or the best at it, or to even become better at it.

 

Sometimes, you just need to enjoy yourself and have some fun. Do it for the love of it and not with the hopes of making it a career or a life-changing transition.

 

I’ve always loved to swim and be in the ocean. It’s absolutely my happy place. I’ve tried surfing and didn’t have the strength or flexibility to get straight up on my feet. I’m determined that at some stage in my life I will learn how to do that and I’ll… inverted commas, surf. If that ever happens, I’m not going to be going and catch massive waves off the coast of Maui. I’m going to be enjoying little baby waves that are fun. Oh and I’m not going to have one of those fancy pointy boards either. I’ll be on the biggest and widest board I can physically carry. Because surfing is something I want to learn one day, how to do for fun. Capital F. U. N. Not to be the next Lane Beachly.

 

Everything I did as a child came with milestones and benchmarks. It was a great way to be raised, because there was an air of responsibility, of ownership and growth in every hobby or extra-curricular activity I had. It taught me great lessons, like expanding my comfort zone (the example I have is around fitness with I was playing school, club and squad hockey all at the same time – again, not well), but through expanding my comfort zone, I not only learned a lot about myself but I also had to dig into the discomfort I was feeling to even try harder, or show-up. I had to, to put it bluntly “get over myself” to actually go and do the thing and I think for me, it built work ethic and character. I would’ve been very content, coasting through had I not had a peer group in high school that I wanted to be on an equal footing with. I never felt like I measured up and my biggest fear was that I would fall behind and not be considered one of them. The irony being that I never felt that way anyway, right!? Competition and a deep need to feel accepted drove me to work harder and harder so I wouldn’t be left behind along with constantly trying to prove to myself that I was good enough and worthy.

 

The thing we don’t learn in high school, or any school, or even adult hood until we do some personal development, is that you were born worthy, you will die worthy and there is nothing you can do or not do, good or bad, wrong or right, that will change your level of worthiness. Your worthiness is up to you to believe in. And this is problematic when from a young age, some of us are taught to believe we're not worthy. Or we're shamed and begin to fuse our behaviours and our identity together, taking “I did a bad thing” to “I am a bad person” – which is really not good, but I’ll come back to that.

 

What I’m getting at is that there are some things in life where it’s great to push. It’s worth being stretched beyond the current confines of our thinking and our comfort zone to find deeper parts within ourselves that we didn’t know were there, and so we can call upon them in future to push, to grow, to level up, and to utilise as a resources when and if need be. By the way, we will only do this when the outcome is important enough for us to manage that level of discomfort that comes from expansion though, right?

 

We will not withstand discomfort if what we’re being uncomfortable enough for is worth what we get at the end. Think about virginity – for any women listening who has had their cherry popped, the only reason you withstand that discomfort is to understand why and how sex can be pleasurable. Having babies – same thing. Smoking - same. Why smoke those first few cigarettes and cough your lungs up? To discover the high nicotine gives you when you can smoke without the coughing. Same as studying. Some people love to study but often, studying is tedious, time consuming, challenging. But without it, we fail exams and don’t get our qualification. Like Ultramarathon Man Dean Karnazes running 50 marathons across 50 states in 50 weeks – insane! Or Johanna Nordblad who broke the world record for swimming under ice. They definitely felt discomfort, and did it anyway. So there’s a point to doing it, and that point is extremely personal to the individual, which is what drives them to continue doing it to get the end result.

 

Coaching is the same by the way. Sometimes, seeing a coach is uncomfortable. If you resist seeing a coach but you’re curious enough about it to listen to me right now, then I’ll tell you with flat out honesty, my guess is that you want and need to see a life coach, it’s calling you, but you’re wondering whether the outcome you’ll get will be worth going through the discomfort for. Am I right? And that discomfort can be spiritually, emotionally, financially, even physically.

 

When the outcome means enough to us, and we can see and put trust in the vehicle that will help us get there, we will be able to persist with the discomfort required to achieve that outcome.

 

As we get older, there is so much more responsibility and consequence associated with everything we do. I never knew this until firstly, I had a great relationship with Damien, secondly, bought a house and thirdly, had kids. I’ve listed them in this order because that’s how it went chronologically in my life. As those responsibilities that I’m talking about, the ones that increase, impacts the ability we have in our lives to pivot. Sometimes, it feels as though it restricts. I always found great empowerment in owning a passport. It meant that at any time, I could rock up to an airport, buy a ticket to wherever I wanted to go and fly there. Planned or unplanned. And I always loved that. Now, while I could do it, there are other people to consider. And that’s the impacted ability to pivot that I’m talking about.

 

Whether it actually does or doesn’t impact you, is entirely up to you, but if you take a big career risk and lose, it’s a very different situation when you’re on your own and can rebuild, versus living with a partner, in a house you pay a mortgage on, while raising a family. Financially and emotionally, you’re in very different places in those two scenarios.

 

So what I’ve found personally, and also with clients I’ve coached is that as we work our way up the corporate ladder and life gets a little more restricted because we want to do right by those we love and are responsible for looking after – whether that be with relationships, families, assets, our jobs, etc, we prioritise less and less time for doing the things we love, just for the sake of it.

 

A client I’ve worked with on and off for a long-time loves travelling. It’s her absolute buzz. But then COVID struck. She got stuck into her job, initially as a distraction, adjusted to working from home and didn’t travel. But in a coaching session with me recently, she realised she hadn’t replaced the lack of travel with anything else in her life. She hadn’t identified the gaping hole labelled “freedom” or “exhilaration” or “adventure” in her life that had been taken away because of the inability to travel during the height of the pandemic. To be clear, it wasn’t the travelling that she missed. The travelling was the vehicle. The thing she missed, was the feelings the travelling gave her – a new perspective, freedom of choice, adventure, spontaneity, newness, access to different food, culture, places, exploration and how that made her feel – in her words, alive and excited. That was what she missed.

 

She used travelling to feel those things. Travelling gave her those things. But that didn’t mean other things wouldn’t enable her to feel those things. Travelling had just become the most obvious and the easiest way to access how she wanted to feel. When we dug a little deeper, she spoke about how as a child she’d loved to do pottery. She also spoke about how much she used to love cooking because she had the time, but with her job and as we’ve identified, life, she had stopped exploring different cuisines to cook. Also because she got that fix from travelling and tasting different foods as she explored different countries.

 

While taking a few pottery classes and spending more time in the kitchen may not replace the emotional momentum she received from travelling, it will fill some of those gaps with other things. Freedom of choice, creativity, adventure because it’s something that she desires to do and lacks prescription or the pressure that comes from other sectors of her life. It may even address new needs that she didn’t know she wanted filling.

 

When did you last do something you love, just for the sake of doing it? Not because you wanted to excel at it, or because it served a purpose other than making you feel free?

 

If you’re having trouble identifying when you’ve ever done anything just to feel free or spontaneous or just because… consider what you loved to do as a child. Did you enjoy riding a bike? Or baking cookies? How about drawing or cross-stitch, or soccer? If you were to schedule time in your busy life to do this, how much time could you spare? Would it be worth it? How would it make you feel and what impact on your life would it have?

 

Thoughts to think about my friends. I’ll see you next week.

 

 

 

 

Hey! Before you go, I always find reviews really helpful when looking for new information or insights…

 

I you’ve found this podcast valuable, please take a minute to write a quick review about what you’ve found most beneficial for you, so other people can benefit from your insights, and listen in too. I would LOVE that!

Also, if there are any topics you’d like me to cover specifically about life coaching or the life coaching industry, visit rhiannonbush.com to contact me. Thanks for joining and I’ll see you in the next episode of Do I Need A Life Coach?!

 

 

Please note, this transcription may not be exact.