The A-C-T Coaching Model
Awareness
Coaching starts by helping you become more self-aware. Over time, through a Socratic style coaching process, you become aware of an astounding variety and amount of things affecting your life and how you’ve been living it. Here is a list of what people often discover through coaching:
- Their deepest wants & desires;
- What’s truly standing in the way of them getting what they want;
- Their natural and unique strengths and gifts;
- Their life purpose;
- Any gaps in skill or experience that they desire to learn to help them move towards their goals;
- Their inner critic, the ‘ego’ or ‘the other voice in their head’, a judgmental and critical messenger running in the background (and often foreground) of their mind that abruptly and shrewdly dissuades the client from pursuing or even thinking about their deepest desires;
- Their underlying values (the things in life they cherish most) and priorities, which guide their choices and they get to see what they have been valuing up until now and what values they wish to honor moving forward;
- The things that bring them pure joy, where life feels effortless and perfect;
- Their default beliefs, mindsets and thinking patterns, which influence and often cloud their perception and experience of life;
- Their ability to change their default beliefs, mindsets and thought patterns to better serve them;
- Their emotions and how they play a huge and often unrecognized part in their lives;
- The things that push their buttons the wrong way (people, activities, situations, etc.) and what it means when they get aggravated/frustrated/discouraged etc.;
- The fact that they are free and responsible to choose exactly how they want to live their life on a day to day basis.
Once you become more self-aware, it’s pretty hard to become unaware (but not impossible – we forget what we’ve learned all the time). Very often just the new awareness, the new perspective of how you’ve been doing life (or business or relationships or money etc.) is enough to prompt you to make significant changes without the stress and the strain. Other times, you will need to dig a little deeper and will need some more support in moving forward.
Choice
Increased awareness leads to a new and expanded array of choices and possibilities regarding what you really want and can really do in your life. You don’t have to wait till you are fully self-aware (which I’m not sure is possible anyway) before you move forward with your life. However, by accepting the freedom and responsibility to ‘choose’ new & better serving thoughts, feelings and actions that are in alignment with your values and goals, you will experience a richer, more meaningful and more fulfilling life. I will encourage and support you in becoming the active and accountable participant in a living learning laboratory (your world).
Through a process of inquiry, active listening and providing non-judgmental feedback to spark new insights and ultimately help you through what’s called the Action-Reflection-Learning cycle, you will grow evermore self-aware and thus, able to make even more effective and authentic choices in your life.
Trust
Moving towards one’s goals tends to bring resistance to change – both internally and externally. Internally, we may feel this resistance as fear, anxiety, unsettledness and stress. Externally, we may only notice the obstacles standing in our way – the things we think we can’t do because we’ve either never done them or we’ve never succeeded at them before.
A big part of coaching handles this resistance head-on through a variety of methods customized to the client as the process unfolds. This is the area of Self-Trust and coaching helps increase your level of trust in yourself over time. In other words, it’s about courage.
“Courage is not about eliminating fear, it’s about learning to act despite it.”
As you grow more self-aware, realize new perspectives and possibilities, make new choices, take new actions and learn from them, you will grow more self-confident. You will begin to realize the true value and immense power of being authentic in every area of your life. This confidence brings with it more ease in your life as you move forward. This is also the area of self-leadership, which carries with it the benefits of being an inspiring leader to others and why so many leaders and business owners are now choosing coaching to help them bring out their best selves.
