I promised you something great and I'm here to deliver.
I like to think of The Self-Coaching Model created by Brooke Castillo as the handstand of mindset work. Just as the handstand is one of the first skills taught in the gym, it's also an element that shows its value in almost all other skills.
Learn how this 'handstand of mindset' can serve you and your athlete(s) in the post: Problems to Solve.
The Self-Coaching Model has five components as listed below: In this post we address the first component.
Circumstance Thought Feeling Action Result
Let's break it down and take a closer look at each particular part and how each part affects the others after it with a five-part post series. This being post one!
Circumstance
Circumstances are things that exist outside of us. They are the bare-bone facts of a situation. A circumstance is something that everyone would agree on.
My child repeated Level 9.
My athlete broke her ankle.
My coach said, "Your legs are bent."
An 8.4 flashed on the scoreboard.
These are all circumstances.
Most of us fret over the circumstances in our life because we believe that they determine our future results. Our brain also credits circumstances as the source of all feelings.
This misconception is why we spend much of our human experience trying to manipulate other humans, control our environment, or change the past. This is extremely disempowering.
Sometimes we can change our circumstances. We can switch gyms or change jobs. Other times we can't. A broken ankle, things people say to us, and our past are a few examples.
And even when we have the ability to swap circumstances, we often find ourselves swapping what we perceive as one problem for another.
I'm not opposed to circumstance-swapping. However, I am proposing that circumstances have less power than we credit them in determining how we show up and our experience of life.
"Life is 10% what happens to us and 90% how we react to it." - Charles R. Swindoll
A crucial step in reclaiming our power is understanding a somewhat hard-to-grasp truth about circumstances; they are neutral. Read that again.
Your child's level? Neutral.
That broken ankle? Neutral.
The coach's words? Neutral.
The score? Neutral.
All circumstances are inherently neutral until we have thoughts about that circumstance. If this concept is new to your brain, it may reject it. That’s okay. Put it on a shelf to ponder and explore later.
If your brain already accepts the notion that circumstances are neutral, it’s important to remember that just because a circumstance is neutral, does NOT mean that we want to MAINTAIN neutrality about everything.
That would be a very robotic, non-human way to experience life. It also would prevent humanity from growth and change.
However, neutrality is an important first step in accessing our full power over any given situation.
Keep going to increase your knowledge and discover the next component in The Self-Coaching Model.