Do You Really Want Your Mom’s Advice?

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Fresh off the Press
August 2007

Fall 2007

**Do You Really Want Your Mom’s Advice?**

Question: “What’s the difference between having a coach and asking for advice from relatives or friends?”

Answer: Lots! First off, as a coach, I don’t give advice.

          A coach is someone who supports you as you find the answers to your own questions. As your coach, I’m 100 percent committed to your growth. A coach’s support and suggestions are informed by years of study. With friends and relatives, their advice—although well-intended—can often be tainted by the disappointments and hurts of their own lives.

Beware of friendly advice.

          I always tell people: You know when you have an issue and you go to your best friend, you go to your relatives, you go to your mother, and you say, “I have this issue, and I don’t know what to do about it,” and those people usually flood you with advice?

          Beware of this advice! Although it may be well-motivated, it is always “tainted advice,” because it is colored by their own personal experiences and desires. For one thing, advice from friends and family is hardly ever without an emotional bias of some kind—whether it’s unconditional love and support for even the foolhardiest of plans, or maybe their fearful resistance to anything new.

          What is equally important to notice is that their advice may not really have anything to do with you, your values, what’s important to you, and what would best support you in moving toward your goals. Rather, it is likely to have much more to do with what they would do in a similar situation, given their circumstances, history, and set of values—although they may not even be aware of that as they pass on their friendly advice.

          They think they’re just being helpful, yet if their advice is unwittingly based on a filter that contains their lives’ disappointments, it can potentially be discouraging to you or otherwise add negativity to your situation. You, on the other hand, want to live your life with purpose and with clarity, in a way that embraces and supports your values, goals, and desires, right?

          Well, that is one of the most important differences between having a coach and asking your friends and relatives for advice: In my role as your coach, I set my personal life, opinions and aspirations aside and make your best interests my only goal. That is, as the result of my professional training, I can be objective about you and your situation, whereas your family and your friends certainly can’t! Also, remember: I am not giving you advice—I am helping you find your own answers to your questions.

Welcome to your journey. Just remember, it’s yours.

          As your personal or business coach, I offer suggestions with the intention of pushing you past your comfort zones and into the realm of personal growth. It is always up to you to choose what to do with those suggestions. Whether you implement them is your final decision.

          Hearing a coach’s informed suggestions—targeted to your individual situation—fosters the process of thinking outside the box. This can often kick-start you into finding your own new way of thinking and finding your own new solutions.

How a coach can help trigger change within you.

          Sometimes I’ll ask, “How would it be to do this?” and that question may or may not trigger you to respond. There is huge treasure to be found in trigger points: They can lead you to recognize that you’re upset about something, which is really good, because that feeling helps bring to light comfort zones you may not have realized you weren’t willing to leave.

          Breaking through your comfort zones is often a place where people get the most results. So triggers can get you stretching your comfort zones and heading closer to your goal of having a changed perspective and a reality that makes your life better for you.

          Ultimately, life is easy once you’ve taken the steps necessary to align your reality with your values—so your decision-making is informed by who you essentially are, and your decisions flow naturally with what you deem to be most important to you.

Defining your blueprint is your most important job.

          Identifying your core values and what is important to you is an important part of coaching. We will work together to bring out into the open the source behind what naturally makes you feel good. Discovering, determining, and choosing to live by your personal values offers tremendous support as you face the responsibility of making life decisions. It also helps you hold yourself accountable for the results that you want in your life, as well as for the person that you are while you get to the results.

          When you read my book, Being in the Present: How to Create the Blueprint of Your Life, you’ll learn that making a blueprint of your life is just like making a map, with where you are right now as your starting point, and where you want to be as your destination. As your coach, I support you as you map out your journey, which is based on your values.

          The blueprint enables you to make informed choices along the way rather than improvising! It also makes the journey smoother and more fun, since you don’t have to agonize over every choice; you can take your next step more easily when you know the values at the core of your being.

          Recognizing your values also helps you understand your past actions and supports you in taking new actions that will allow you to live your life in alignment with those values.

Imagine what life would be like if you were living according to your true values.

          I’m just going to give you a general example: Let’s look at something that you may already know about yourself. Say you value nature very highly. You really like to stay in the open air; you like to go hiking; and when you’re indoors or in the city for too long, you get cranky and crave a trip to the country.

          Picture yourself planning your next holiday. Since you know that you value nature, this value is naturally going to be key when you’re planning your time away. You’ll probably head to the beach or the mountains rather than to a new city, to the theatre, or on an outing to visit several museums. Acknowledging your love of nature and outdoor living supports you in making decisions, like where to go on holiday. It’s easy. You already know.

          Imagine the ease you’ll feel in your decision-making processes once you have established your values around things like money, relationships, career, and other major areas in your life. Suddenly, you will already know what is right for you when faced with life decisions—because you’ll see right away whether the choices you are making and the actions you are taking are aligned with your own unique value system.

It’s all about you. Coaching explores who you uniquely are.

          When people think they don’t know something, what’s often really the case is that they just don’t know they actually already know it! Sound tricky? What that means is that I think you know more about yourself than you may realize.

          A trained professional coach is really a catalyst for connecting you to the things about yourself that you haven’t consciously explored before. Ask yourself this: Who’s the best expert on you? Not your mom, your spouse, or your best friend. You are! Talking to a trained professional coach connects you to more than what you already know about yourself. Coaches connect you to those things you don’t “know you know” about yourself!

          How do you think it would feel to stop going to friends and family to ask them what you should do and instead ask yourself? You’re closer to finding the answer than you think.

          My book and journal, Being in the Present: How to Create the Blueprint of Your Life, offers useful tools to get you started on your journey to discovering who you really are, who you want to be, and how to get the most out of your life. Most powerful when used in conjunction with personal coaching sessions, these tools show you how to become the leader of your own life by getting to know yourself in an honest and non-judgmental way. And once the judgment is out of the way, you can make an accurate assessment of yourself and let go of the drama.

          The role of a coach is not to give advice; it is to support people in finding their own answers to their questions. Coaching is all about you, and the only formula is that there is no formula—there is only what works for you.

          My goal as a coach is to support you in getting what you want out of life. Together, we design an individual strategy that is aimed at addressing your wants, your values, and your goals. You hold the key to your own happiness, and together we can unlock the door!

Contact Monica

Special Package Offer

This special package offer includes a copy of both of Monica’s books, Outsmart Stress! and Being in the Present (along with its companion CD), and an individual coaching session (itself a $150* value). This collection of valuable, life-enhancing tools, which retails for $240, is available for just $79.
To take advantage of this limited offer, visit www.lunacoaching.com today!
* All prices in Canadian dollars.