Changing something in yourself or your life can be so difficult and frustrating. Transformational coaching is a way to hack your reality and enable you to change effortlessly and without force. Image by agsandrew.
We all have things about ourselves and our lives that we’d like to be different or working better. Perhaps you’ve tried to change something in your life without success. Maybe a change lasted for a short while and then you found yourself back where you started, sometimes without even being consciously aware of it. Or maybe you just didn’t manage to change at all despite your best intentions and willpower.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to hack into your own ‘operating system’ and enable change to happen effortlessly and without force?
Why change is so difficult
It can be frustrating when you really want to change something in your life or resolve an issue that’s holding you back but things just won’t shift, however hard you try.
What is it that pulls you back like that? It’s like something in you has a gravitational force that keeps you stuck and every time you try to escape its grip it drags you back down.
This is your ‘default way of being’. It’s your basic way of operating in life and it’s what you always revert to unless you free yourself from its power.
Your default way of being
Each of us has a default way of being. It’s like a human version of a computer’s operating system: it contains programming that sets the scope of what’s possible for you and how you operate in life.
Just like computers, this programming doesn’t always work too well and it can produce results that are less than ideal. It can contain the human equivalent of malware, computer viruses, potentially unwanted programs, bugs and poorly written or outdated code.
Your internal programming acts like an operating system, governing how you perceive the world and how you function in life. Image by Markus Spiske.
Your internal reality determines your experience of the world
The way life is for you is a product of your default way of being. It might look like things happen wholly outside you and separately from you, but it’s how you are within yourself that determines how the outer world shows up for you and how successfully (or not) you navigate life. Your experience of the world is filtered through the lens of your internal reality.
Where your default way of being came from
Your default way of being is shaped by your conditioning and your worldview – your thoughts, beliefs, viewpoints and attitudes about yourself, others and the world. This is your internal operating system and it dictates who you are to the world, who you’re capable of being and how the world is to you.
It comes from your life experiences and how you responded to them in order to survive, protect yourself and control your environment. It operates unconsciously, like a program always running in the background. It binds and limits you, setting a boundary that you can’t go outside of.
Internal system of rules
Your default way of being contains rules, decisions, beliefs, commands, attitudes and viewpoints about who you can and can’t be and about how the world is to you.
These are essentially variations of the fundamental misbeliefs ‘I’m not okay as I am’ and ‘There’s something wrong with me’, which create an internal compulsion to be something other than who you are in order to feel that you’re okay.
Here are some examples of the contents of a default way of being:
- beliefs or conclusions about yourself, such as ‘I’m not good enough’, ‘I’m unwanted’, ‘I’m unlovable’
- decisions based on how the world has appeared to you, such as ‘The world is unwelcoming’, ‘It’s not safe to stand out from the crowd’, ‘Life is a struggle’
- outward-pointing commands designed to control your environment and keep you safe, such as ‘Don’t get too close to me’, ‘Don’t tell me what to do’, ‘Don’t see me’
- inward-pointing commands that you took on from others, such as ‘Don’t have needs’, ‘Don’t aim too high in life’, ‘Don’t be yourself’
- strategies in order to feel that you’re okay and acceptable, such as ‘I must always be perfect’, ‘I must never show my feelings’, ‘I must always be strong’
- viewpoints about how things should be, such as ‘People must always treat me well’, ‘I must always get love and approval’, ‘Life must always go the way I want it to’
- protective attitudes to defend against fears and anxiety, such as ‘Men can’t be trusted’, ‘Women will always hurt me’, ‘If I avoid taking on responsibility I won’t look bad if something goes wrong’.
These are all learned responses that are collected and created as you go through life and devise ways of dealing with things that are traumatic, unpleasant or difficult to handle.
This is unavoidable and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it – it’s part of the human condition and we’re all subject to it. It’s quite amazing how it happens really.
You could get along in life without doing anything about it, but it does limit you to playing a smaller game than you’re capable of. It keeps you at the effect of life rather than you being at cause in your life. It stops you expressing your best self and living the fullest, happiest, most satisfying life that’s available to you.
You can’t see what’s in your blind spot
The problem is that you can’t see for yourself the things in your default way of being that are holding you back because they’re hidden in your unconsciousness or your ‘blind spot’.
These are your ‘unknown unknowns’, the things you don’t even know that you don’t know, and they run you like a computer program until you make them known, when you’ll then be able to do something about them.
This is why it can be so difficult to change and why changes you do make often don’t last. The gravitational force of your default way of being is too strong for you to escape and it constantly pulls you back to your default position.
Transforming your internal reality
So what can you do about this? Fortunately, it’s possible to transform your default way of being – or ‘hack your reality’ – with the help of someone like a coach, mentor or personal development group.
Working with someone skilled in the transformational process is essential if you really want significant and lasting change in your life. It enables you to discover, reveal and resolve the things in your blind spot that are stopping you implementing the changes you seek and living the life you really want.
When you transform your internal reality, the outer world shows up differently.
Transforming your internal reality frees you from your default programming and opens up the space to manifest the life you really want. Image by agsandrew.
Transformational coaching is a way of hacking your internal reality. It creates the space for you to choose freely and consciously rather than being run automatically by your fixed internal programming. It enables change to happen effortlessly and without force. It removes the blocks to change rather than trying to force something different on top of what’s already there.
The limitations of non-transformational approaches
Most personal growth, spiritual development and life coaching techniques work on things in your outer life, so there’s a limit to what they can achieve because you’re still the same person inside. You still have the same internal reality, always pulling you back to your default way of being, and the world keeps showing up in accordance with that internal reality.
It can’t be otherwise: if you’re wearing yellow-tinted glasses, the world will continue to appear yellow to you unless and until you remove the glasses.
Transformational coaching works at the level of your beingness, which is where genuine transformation occurs, rather than merely trying to improve things in your outer life or make them more bearable.
Deep, effective and lasting change in your outer life is achieved only through transforming the way you are at the most fundamental level of your self – by hacking into your default way of being and releasing the things that block and limit you. Your outer life is a reflection of your inner life and so it’s within you that the most effective work is done.
Freedom from your default way of being opens new possibilities
When you become free from the old, unconscious ways of being and thinking that are limiting you or stopping you being your authentic and best self, you stand in a new, clear space. Here you can consciously create your life without fighting against the gravitational pull of your default way of being.
The more you transform your default way of being, the less gravitational pull it exerts on you and the more free you are to be yourself. You’ll experience a new sense of mastery and the ability to live the life you really want. You’ll be able to be at peace with yourself and with the world.
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