How To Be Your Own Life Coach In 7 Simple Steps

With very few exceptions, every person on the planet can benefit from life coaching. There doesn’t seem to be any shortage of so-called negative feelings floating around such as: anger, frustration, insecurity, fear, loathing, jealousy, uncertainty, helplessness—and the list goes on.

Life coaching, when you think about it, is just an alternative phrasing for: personal growth, self improvement, transformation or personal development. Most everyone it seems is looking for some way to change or improve their lives… sometimes in small, subtle ways and often in very big ones.

It could be becoming a better parent or partner. Maybe it’s job advancement and earning more money. Losing weight, living a healthier lifestyle and being more attractive never goes out of style.

How about making more sales or becoming a more effective manager. Some people seek support in making a much-needed career change.

Although the above are diverse reasons for life coaching, everyone of them share a common thread. If you ask yourself why you would want to improve in any area of your life, the ultimate reason would end up coming down to…

It would make you happier. Or more at peace with yourself. Or a feeling of contentment.

We’re all seeking the same thing: a happy existence here on earth free from agitation and anxiousness.

The following seven steps will serve as a guide to being your own life coach and help you to get where you want to go—or be who you want to be.

None of these seven steps are earth-shattering. They are considered universal laws; timeless techniques that will inspire you to self-coach the shit out of yourself.

We’ll begin by laying some necessary groundwork that will allow you to make personal growth changes that will last a lifetime.

Step #1 – We’ve Got This Happiness Thing Ass-Backwards

Unfortunately, we’ve all been programmed from birth to find happiness by manipulating external circumstances. Being happy is conditional. You’ll be happy when, and if:

• You wind up meeting the right person
• You find a better paying job
• The weather warms up
• There’s an x amount of money in your bank account
• Mary arrives on time
• You lose x number of pounds
• Racism finally goes away
• That new Tesla is sitting in your garage
• You get your ass out of the rain

Fortunately, some of those circumstances you can control, but some—like Mary arriving on time—you can’t.

Of the things on the list that you do have some say-so in (like the Tesla), it’s entirely possible to be happy (for now) with the car that you are now slugging around in until the Tesla shows up.

Actually, there can be a lot of power in accepting your current situation—even being grateful for it—as it is.

Harshly judging your current state of affairs has a tenacious way of cementing things into place, making it more challenging to change your circumstances. There’s nothing wrong with accepting reality as it is now, while maintaining your intention to improve upon the current situation.

The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius put it well:

“Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?”

As for the things that you have absolutely no control over (Mary again), you will be happier by breaking the nasty habit of arguing with reality. That’s an argument that you will lose 100% of the time… so says Byron Katie. And she is 100% spot-on.

Happy people have one thing in common. They have what could be called challenging circumstances in their lives—just like you and me—but they have trained themselves to accept them… especially those situations that they have absolutely no control over.

They don’t argue with reality. They realize that the way it is, is the way it is.

These happy souls have also learned to not lament what happened in the past. Things went down the way they did because they were supposed to. How do we know that things were supposed to turn out the way they did?

Because the reality is… they did! Since we can’t change the facts, might as well accept them.

Once you are able to master this concept of not arguing with reality, everything will change for you. It will be much easier to self-coach yourself through so-called trying times. Mastering acceptance will bring an end to drama in your life.

You will move past the point of allowing circumstances to control your thoughts. You will become one of the select few who are happy-to-be-happy. Those people have made the simple decision to just BE happy—97% of the time anyway.

Sometimes you will find it impossible to accept a tenuous situation that you find yourself in—maybe it’s a relationship or a job—and you are unable to change it (which is often the case). You are then left with one remaining option. And that is to leave.

Leaving an impossible situation is something that you ALWAYS have control over. Being your own life coach would require you to make that tough decision.

Step #2 – Make Your Brain Your Bitch

Okay, you see the upside of changing how you think. You can now grasp how circumstances can—and for most people do—influence your thought process; and not always for the better. Now let’s expand upon this line of thinking.

When it comes to being your own life coach, realizing that your current life situation is the result of your thought processes up to this point. Yes, embracing that notion will place you perfectly in position to take full responsibility for your life.

Here’s how it works:

• Your thoughts cause you to feel a certain way
• Those feelings cause you to take specific actions
• Your actions directly determine the results you get in your life

You’ve most likely been exposed to this before: your life is simply an out-picturing of your thoughts and inner-most beliefs. From within—so without.

None of this is new. This precept has spewed from the mouths of enlightened masters for thousands of years; and more recently has been echoed by many leading and well-respected quantum physicists.

That being said, this Thoughts/Feelings/Actions/Results self-coaching model has been refined, popularized and further developed by Brooke Castillo, a master life coach.

If being aware of and managing your thinking process is the determining factor in how your life plays out, shouldn’t this be your number-one-job if you want to be your own life coach?

Damn right it should. I’ll go as far to say that altering the way you think is the most important skill that any of us can perfect in order to improve our lives.

I hate to say this but many, if not most people today are in a mental rut. They are constantly entertaining thoughts such as fear, dissatisfaction, anger, contempt, lack, limitation, greed, gossip, judgment, jealously, etc.

That type of thinking promotes a breeding ground for negativity. If you’re sending those types of vibrations out into the world, how can you possibly expect that your life will change in the direction of your desires?

I would like to suggest that you try to stop judging everything for one day. You will probably be shocked-to-shit as to how you’ve been running your brain.

View every circumstance that arises for what it really is… something that just is, without attaching any judgment to it. No right, no wrong, no good, no bad.

The truth is… neither you or me or pretty much anyone else has enough wisdom to be judging ANYTHING. Once you judge something, then you’ll be inclined to judge everything.

I like what the poet Rumi once said:

“Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there”

If you really want to to be your own life coach and become more—whatever that means to you—then adopting a non-judgmental narrative will have an immediate impact on the quality of your life.

When you stop analyzing, labeling, critiquing and judging everything, you can climb out of the quagmire. Life becomes more peaceful. You begin to live with grace.

Step #3 – Time Isn’t What It Appears To Be

Being your own life coach would seem to necessitate being able to manage your time better, right? Not so fast. What would you say if I told you that time wasn’t what you thought it was?

WTF!

Well, time isn’t only not what you think it is, but it doesn’t really exist. You may have heard of this concept before, and if you think about it for less than a minute, you’ll come to the obvious conclusion that time really is just an illusion.

Does yesterday still exist? No.

Does tomorrow yet exist? No.

Is an hour ago still something that’s real? No.

How about an hour from now? Is it really any sort of place yet? No.

The truth is that time only exists in our minds. It’s simply a mental construct that we humans have devised to remember the past and fantasize about—and plan for—the future. If we used time as a tool for only those purposes, everything would be just fine.

But we don’t.

We use time to not only remember pleasant times but to also regret them, second-guess them, grieve about them and to have nightmares about them.

The future’s a bit different. We use it to get excited about an upcoming vacation. But we also worry and agonize about what might happen if something goes terribly wrong.

We can have pleasant thoughts about the picnic with Mary last week and exciting thoughts about seeing Mary again sometime soon.

There can also be distasteful thoughts about the argument at work yesterday. And anxious thoughts about asking your boss for a raise tomorrow.

The common word that I hope you can identify here: thoughts!

That’s the downside of time. Sure, we use it to provide us with feelings of delight and cheer, but time—when used in an unresourceful manner—can also cause agitation and emotional pain.

Being your own life coach, you obviously would want to eliminate any feelings of worry, fear and anxiety.

There’s two ways to do this:

1. Train your brain to live and think only in the present moment… the NOW
2. Manage your thoughts where you eliminate the negative ones (like in Step #2 above)

Both skills can be challenging to master.

Eckhart Tolle talks about living in the present moment in his landmark book, The Power of Now.

Dale Carnegie did the same when he wrote How To Stop Worrying and Start Living 50 years earlier. He popularized the concept of living in day-tight compartments.

Carnegie was no doubt on the same page, of the same chapter, of the same book as the Dalai Lama:

“There are only two days in the year that nothing can be done. One is called yesterday and the other is called tomorrow”

If the Dalai Lama doesn’t do it for you, we can always backtrack to Rumi:

“Past and future veil God from our sight: burn up both of them with fire”

The essential take-away with Step #3 is that time is merely a mental tool that we have invented to help manage our lives. It doesn’t really exist, nor do any thoughts about it exist. Only in your mind.

Unfortunately, we have become masters at using this tool to create a breeding ground for unresourceful thoughts about what happened in the past and what might happen in the future that often bear no resemblance to the truth.

Step #4 – From Taking To Giving – The Art of Abundance

Much interest in becoming your own life coach stems from the desire to create more abundance in your life. Including more moola! Earning money can often feel like a massive struggle. And it is for many folks. The tried-and-true recipe for more-cash-in-the-bank has always been to spend less than you make.

I would never argue with sound financial advice such as that. But spending less can subtly transform into a hoarder’s mentality if you’re not careful. Before you know it, you are certainly spending less but at the same time, giving less too.

And in the spirit of keeping the spending/earning scale unbalanced in your favor, it’s tempting to start taking more also.

Why not flip things around.

It’s counter-intuitive as hell but by giving first, one can actually increase the amount of shekels that come your way. When you give freely you basically send a signal to the universe that there is so much abundance in your life that you can afford to give some of it away.

There’s plenty enough to go around.

Giving inspires universal-cash-flow to begin flowing through your life. Whatever you give has an eerie way of coming back to you—not necessarily from the same source that you gave too—and typically in a multiple of what you gave.

Developing an abundance mindset is one of the coolest things you can do when life coaching yourself. From my own, and millions of other’s experiences, it works really well. The only requirement is that you have to believe that it does work. Better yet, know it.

Establishing a giving mindset is effective in other areas of life equally well. Just give what you want.

• If you want friends, be friendly
• If you want love, give love
• If you want to be interesting, be interested
• If you want help with anything, help others

Marianne Williamson, in her beautiful book, A Return To Love, points out:

“The choice to give what we haven’t received is always an available option.”

There’s a whole lot more you can experience in this modern world by having some extra cash on hand. By focusing on what you can give first will completely change the way you perceive and receive money. It can come in such strange, unexpected and magical ways that will blow you away.

One must experience this phenomenon firsthand to grasp how it unfolds in real life. A one-time unexpected appearance of cash can be chalked up to coincidence. The second time may be a fluke-of-fate.

But when it happens for the third time, you know that there is something magical at play that defies any type of logical explanation.

Sure, money itself won’t make you happier. The things and experiences money can buy won’t necessarily do so either. But more cash can provide you with the time and freedom to explore fun, exciting opportunities and experiences that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.

Step #5 – The Wizard vs The Warrior

Can’t really talk about being your own life coach without mentioning goal setting, can we? Let’s do a bit more than a mere mention. Why not take a medium-shallow dive into this controversial subject.

Goal setting has managed to cross from one side of the spectrum to the other. It’s gone from an absolute-must-have-tool in your life coaching toolbox to… are you serious?

Setting goals has gone from popular to polarizing—all seemingly in the span of a decade.

People who bash on setting goals point out that it pushes one to spend too much of the present moment, planning for and fantasizing about the future. That certainly can happen.

Another possible downside is that by setting goals you can also be setting yourself up for disappointment and delusion—especially if there is a time limit for achieving them.

Still, you’re a creature that naturally comes with desires. And those desires are by default, things you want in your life that aren’t already there. Hence, goals.

Goals are the way of the warrior. If there’s something you want, you plan everything out and then take the necessary action to achieve it. Goals are all about the future.

Typically, goals also have dates attached to them. All of a sudden, you have magically manufactured a possible problem that comes with not achieving the goal within the stated time frame. Do you really need to add that type of stress to your life?

A goal can also be limiting. Maybe there’s something you would like to manifest in your life that—unbeknownst to you—could happen sooner, or maybe a lot sooner, that your goal-date would indicate. Like maybe… ASAP.

From an expanded perspective, goals are just another way of attempting to get the world to do what you want it to.

Let me suggest that there is an easier and more efficient way of getting what you want. Achieving goals involves struggle and stress. You’re always pushing forward. If you push too hard, sometimes you can actually push what you want further away from yourself.

That’s not the way a wizard brings things into their lives. A wizard, wisely, doesn’t set goals. A wizard sets intentions for the things and experiences they would like to appear in their lives.

What’s the difference between an goal and an intention?

With goals, you are constantly pushing forward towards them. With an intention, you are attracting what you want to you. Instead of chasing, you’re attracting.

To achieve goals, you have to develop a belief that you can acquire something or be someone at some point in the future. As already pointed out, goals are always future oriented.

An intention however, is a simple statement of truth.

Intentions are past oriented. When a wizard sets an intention, they don’t need to believe anything. They already know. They’re certain. Knowing—certainty—always trumps wanting, wishing or believing.

If you already know something to be true, then it’s old news; past tense. The universe has no choice but to deliver what is already a fact. That’s the way of the wizard.

The warrior however must foster a strong belief that they can accomplish their goal sometime in the future, and then proceed to push-on forward.

What would you rather be, a wizard who effortlessly attracts or a warrior who relentlessly pushes? Both intentions and goals are effective. The wizard’s way is much more efficient however.

Step #6 – Surrender or… Detach From the Outcome

Once we set a goal—or better yet, an intention—our analytical brains tend to get real busy trying to figure out how to bring what we want into our lives. We have a penchant for wanting to know how and when.

Sophisticated plans and timelines are developed to ensure that our target is achieved exactly how and when we would like it to play out. And if things don’t happen to turn out pretty close to the way we want, and within an acceptable time-frame, then we tend to label the entire plan, including ourselves, a failure.

How many times do events unfold exactly like you have envisioned them? Like absolutely never! The universe often has alternative and more efficient ways of helping you to get where you want to go.

Our biased, subjective and analytical minds often have no way of knowing everything that there is to know about how to achieve a specific outcome.

That’s where detachment comes in.

The most important act of creation is setting the intention. It’s enough to know exactly what you want, not how you’re necessarily going to achieve it. When you are able to detach from the outcome, you allow the universe to work its magic in an uninhibited and unlimited fashion.

You never want to limit the unlimited.

Just set the intention, and let the universe work out the details.

Will things manifest on their own without us actively doing anything? Once in a while, yes. But since we’re not yet full-fledged spiritual masters, then it helps—like a lot—to have channels and conduits in place that provide ways for things to manifest into our lives.

Typically that so-called conduit is in the form of a job, a business, a service, a product, an idea, a collaboration, etc.

Money, material things, relationships and business opportunities can come to you in unexpected ways that you couldn’t possibly dream-up on your own. When you are able to detach from so-called reliable, logical and well-known methods, you open-up a portal where things can flow in your direction in wondrous ways.

Still, any pathway that you set-up to help things along is going to require a certain amount of effort.

Step #7 – Be, Do, Have – Set Your Vibration First

Your interest in personal growth and being your own life coach has likely exposed you to the concept of be-do-have. Although action shares a symbiotic relationship with having, doing something is the final and least important part of bringing what you want into your life.

Most of us have been taught the ass-backwards way of living or… do-have-be.

If you take massive action, then you will create something—a material possession or a personal trait—that will leave you basking in a state of happiness.

That’s the warrior mentality discussed back in Step #5. Life has a way of turning into a stressful struggle following this model.

Flipping things around to be-do-have places action where it properly belongs; as merely the final component of the creation process. Acting merely puts in place a system that allows you to receive what you have already created by first being what you desire.

As so aptly stated by David Cameron Gikandi in his awesome book, A Happy Pocket Full of Money, the first step in the creation of anything begins with your vibration.

Your vibration sends a strong signal to the universe of what your intentions are.

BEING, automatically broadcasts the appropriate vibrations that are congruent with your state of mind. Since it’s already a done deal in your mind, all you have to do is put together a plan of action that will allow you to receive that which you already are.

By setting up the creation process in this manner, you recruit the universe to help manifest what you already ARE. This leaves nothing to chance. It by-passes all the anxiousness, worry, doubt and uncertainty associated with bringing what you want into your life.

When you already ARE, life has no choice but to follow suit and surround yourself with the things that are congruent with who you have set the intention to be.

You can be whatever and whoever you want!

Of course you have some intrinsic characteristics downloaded from nature when you were born. Perhaps you’re an introvert, mechanically inclined, an artist, etc. But the superficial you, who you present yourself to society as, is mainly a conglomeration of cultural conditioning which you had little say in.

Wanna be someone else? Maybe a more caring person living with grace and an abundant lifestyle? Then begin acting like you already are that person and let the universe take care of the details.

Sure, you have to help things along by using your analytical brain to come up with some sort of plan. But by first setting an intention, you will receive subtle insights and inspirations that will show you the proper course of action.

And that action will provide a channel for you to receive the things that are compatible with what you are in vibrational alignment with.

Wrap-up of the 7 Steps

By mastering the above 7 steps to personal growth, you will have life coached yourself as effectively as any professional life coach possibly could. You could actually be able to competently coach someone else if you wanted to.

Here’s a quick recap:

1. Laying a powerful foundation for your emotional well-being begins with accepting any situation for what is is—nothing more and nothing less. You never want to argue with reality.
2. Taking control of your thoughts is imperative to establishing a positive tone for your life. Constantly judging everything tends to send you on a downward spiral into negativity. It’s difficult to make positive changes to your life when you’re mired in the mud.
3. Regret, second guessing and mistakes from the past only serve to haunt you. Fear, worry and anxiousness about the future will destroy your present peace and happiness. They’re all merely thoughts in your head—stories that you continue to tell yourself about things that either no longer exist, or have no way of possibly existing yet. Living more in the present moment is the way to avoid these negative emotions. Treat them for what they are: sign-posts that you believe in something that just isn’t true.
4. Waiting to give before you receive is not how the world works. It’s actually just the opposite. Giving fearlessly and lovingly first is the quickest way to bring what you want into your life. The only thing missing in any situation is what you’re not providing.
5. When you set an intention, you are establishing a vibration of who you are and what is certain about your life. There’s no more wishing and half-ass-hoping. A wizard is certain who they are and what will naturally—and inevitably—manifest into their lives.
6. Once your intention is set, then it’s time to detach from how the eventual outcome will come to transpire. Leave it up to the universe to sort out the details. To help things along, work to set-up one or more solid pathways that will allow your creations to manifest.
7. Although seemingly counter-intuitive, action, although necessary, is the final and least important piece to the creation puzzle. Congruent actions allow your intentional vibrations to be realized. First BE. Then DO.

Now… go be your own life coach!

Want More on How to Be Your Own Life Coach?

Perhaps you’d like find out more about life coaching in general. Or maybe you’re interested in learning how to life coach yourself. If that sounds like you, there are more life coaching articles that would probably be of interest to you… right here.