My Top 3 Break Throughs: Perfectionism, Burnout and 4 powers

I decided to learn how to be a Coach after experiencing the benefits of it in my personal life. It made such a difference to me personally that I wanted to be able to use it with my friends and loved ones.

Coaching is versatile and can be applicable for your career, sport, artistic endeavours…..any area that you want to improve your performance or enjoyment.

Let me share my own top 3 break throughs from coaching:

1. Too much trust contributed to perfectionism Having grown up in the country where “what you see is what you get”, I trusted people automatically. I gave my trust freely however, my belief was that if people break my trust, that’s it, they only get one chance. It was a black and white view of the world. What I wasn’t consciously aware of was that I expected people to think this way about me too. I believed that if I made a mistake, I would also only get one chance, so I strived to be perfect. When I realised that this simply isn’t true, I gained freedom and a sense that I don’t have to get things right the first time I attempt them. I was also able to quality control my levels of trust for others, checking, questioning and verifying that their words and actions are aligned. No longer being a perfectionist has significantly reduced my stress and improved my relationships with colleagues and loved ones.
   

2. Over responsibility and perfectionism are a recipe for burnout I was taught that it is crucial to be considerate of other people. Over a lifetime this morphed into an over-responsibility for others. If someone I worked with was emotional or had a problem I believed that it was up to me to help them fix it. Can you imagine what it might be like if you believed that everything you did had to be perfect and that it was also crucial to look after others? Yep, it left little time for rest, meant that boundaries were permeable and the standards were unreasonable. I was so focussed on others that I didn’t even realise until years later, looking back with hindsight that I had experienced burnout. Healthy responsibility and holding intentions rather than expectations is my new way of being, making burnout a thing of the past.
   

3. I am responsible for my 4 powers How do I maintain healthy responsibility? I remind myself of the 4 powers, these are the only things each person truly has control over and therefore we can never be responsible for these in anyone else. They are: Internal Powers - what we think and feel;

   External Powers - what we say and do. It may seem basic when you read it but check for yourself…..do you have power over how you think, feel and what you say, do? Do you have this power in every context? These days if I catch myself worrying about what someone else will think of me I take that as a reminder of my 4 powers. I remember that I can’t control how other people think of me and that when I focus on what I think, feel, say and do, I am grounded in my own power.