Personal Development Part Two: Therapy

“Learning can sometimes feel illusive, but comes in little epiphanies.  Is that an oxymoron I wonder?”

This is a note I made for myself after a Gestalt therapy session.  I’m feeling something profound shifting in me, but I’m not trying to change.  The little epiphanies are not actions.  They are realisations.  About who I am and what is important to me.

I won’t share the content of what I am working on but I will share what I think is shifting in me.

I’m not working on becoming a better coach in my therapy (I mean, that’s not the driver), but I do feel myself learning how to be a better coach as I experience this therapeutic work.

I experience the power of sitting with.  Of not striving for.

I feel the intensity of not knowing (what I am going to bring each time, where the session might take me, what I might walk away with).

I feel a sense of frustration about the not knowing, yet that is causing me to think more deeply.  To uncover the unspoken knowns.  And to go to darker places to uncover those unspoken knowns.

I have more capacity to be braver than I thought in staying in those darker places to gain more insight from deep within.  And more bravery to stand up for what I believe in (little by little).

I feel myself pinging from one thing to the next, not really understanding the connections.  This is new for me as I see myself as an S in Myers Briggs terminology and have historically thought I was not capable of the bigger picture N.  I am more adaptable, more rounded, less fixed than I thought.  Not polar opposites.  Both/and not either/or.  More whole.

I’m being (a bit) kinder to myself.  The “mean girl” who I have been trying to suppress has so much to offer the world. She wants to show her love in a different way to the “good girl”.   She is inviting me to play The Fool archetype, saving “the powerful from the fallacies and pitfalls of their omnipotence”, eliciting also the “hidden goodness and latent generosity” (Hetty Einzig).

I don’t feel quite ready to rattle cages but you might experience something different in me.  Two of my esteemed colleagues have given me feedback to that effect this week.  It’s not a conscious change, but it’s just kind of emerging from my pores.

And as these hitherto hidden parts of me are coming into the light, I am able to bring them to the people with whom I work in coaching.  I can now work with them in ways and places that I have taken myself to.

I wrote last time about the power of personal development to support us to be at our best, as our best.   This is one of the personal development investments I am making in myself as a human and as a coach.  For me, it’s been a game-changer.

When I became an MCC, someone wrote that this was only the start of the learning (even after 22 years as a coach).  I nodded sagely, but I don’t think I quite knew what that would mean for me.  Now I am starting to understand, as I move past competencies.  I needed that grounding, but it was just that – a grounding.

I’m not saying that you should follow this therapeutic path (though I am feeling rather evangelistic about it), but I do want to encourage you to think about your personal development as well as your professional development.

I’ll write more about my personal development over the next few posts.  Again, not for you to follow the same path, but as a window into other aspects of our development as coaches.

This series is inspired by Julia Carden and Elizabeth Crosse, whose research into personal development has got me thinking and stretching myself!