CHANGE COACH CONVERSATIONS #5 HOW TO HELP SOMEONE BREAK A HABIT
CHANGE COACH CONVERSATIONS #5 HOW TO HELP SOMEONE BREAK A HABIT
Welcome back to Change Coach Conversations! Today we’re going to talk about how to help someone break a habit.
So here’s the thing: Most of what we do, feel, and experience is habitual.
All habits are the same, all anxiety, worry, repetitive thoughts, insecurity, patterns and issues we find ourselves in in relationships. All habit.
How do we help people find freedom from the habits that are hurting them?
Not by diving into the details and specifics. There is nothing to fix.
Not by focusing on behavior first. That doesn’t last.
And not by treating different habits differently, or looking at specialized solutions. That’s unnecessarily complicated and actually points away from what helps.
If all habits (all problems and all suffering) are psychological, we help people go beyond their psychology.
How? By seeing that their problems are psychological and that is much more to them and to life.
We help people see that their experience is not ‘them’ or ‘theirs’. It comes and goes. It’s fleeting, in motion, always changing psychology. And beyond our psychology, when we can see beyond it, we’re well. Habit-free. Content.
So we point there. We point there by helping them see how ALL experience works.
�Sometimes we talk about the habit. We explore things about their life and about their behavior, but we’re not IN their life or behavior trying to fix anything. Nothing is broken. We’re showing them that their experience is habitual, however that might show up. They don’t have the habit, their mind does.
It is remarkable what that begins to open up from this exploration.
Then we coach them through the predictable, human misundestandings that show up. Like the idea of triggers. Everyone things they need to avoid triggers, until they realize there are no triggers!�
And like the idea of setbacks. There is so much coaching we can do to help people see that falling back into a habitual thought or behavior is meaningless.
And the tendency for our mind to be all or nothing, to make rules about what we do, don’t do, will never do, etc. That’s just the way a mind works and we can help people see that at the psychological level so that, again, they rise above it.
So it’s helping them see how humans work, what’s true of all of us, and who we really are.
And then it’s coaching them to see that more deeply. Coaching them through blind spots and places where their mind assigns meaning to something that has no real meaning.
It’s easier than it seems for us and on them. We’re peeling back layers of thought to reveal what we’re looking for…it’s not about adding- or DOING-focused. We back them off of willpower and toward insight.
And this is the way we help pretty much anything, in a very simple way. Everything that pains us is at the level of psychology. So much of what we suffer with is habitual psychology that people can very easily see in a new way.
Thank you for listening to these Change Coach Conversations! I’ll be back next week with Change Coach Conversation #6: Keeping yourself out of the coaching conversation.
The Change Coach Training Program is a 5-month, incredibly in-depth, very small group training that will have you seeing life differently as you’re learning to point others toward their own health and freedom. You will leave this program ready to make a living sharing this understanding. Go here to see more: https://dramyjohnson.com/coachtraining/